Eléna Gee

Eléna Gee was born in Auckland in 1949 and developed her skills in handcrafts through her family. She recalled her grandmother teaching her to make shell boxes when she was a child and would later teach herself metalwork in her father's workshop, where he worked as an aircraft engineer. With limited access to formal training in jewellery making in New Zealand, Gee considers herself to be largely self-taught, though she later attended workshops with the leading contemporary jewellers Arline Fisch, Herman Jünger and Otto Künzli. Following her graduation from St Mary’s College in 1969, Gee spent a year as a trainee commercial jeweller before moving to Australia in 1970. There, she held her first exhibition at Gallery 16 in Sydney in 1972. Gee also taught jewellery at the Waverley Woollahra Arts School and worked as a resident craftsperson at the Sturt Workshops in New South Wales. Her work was selected for two Australian exhibitions that toured Europe and Asia. In 1981, Gee returned to New Zealand where she found fewer opportunities for contemporary jewellery. In response, she co-founded Details, a collective of local jewellers, and in 1985 she joined Fingers, a jewellery co-operative in Auckland which has been operating for over fifty years. In 1988, Gee’s work was featured in the influential exhibition Bone Stone Shell: New Jewellery New Zealand, which toured internationally for five years across New Zealand, Australia, and Asia. She continues making work and was the subject of the survey exhibition Eléna Gee: World/Body/Myth at Objectspace in 2020.