Awarded Munich’s Prize for Visual Arts (Foerderpreis für Bildende Kunst) in 2013, Helen Britton continues to be recognized for her work in contemporary jewelry. In conjunction with the prize, a short catalogue was published and Sienna Patti had the opportunity to write the short essay, below. To order a copy of the limited edition catalogue visit our bookstore.
It is not hard to imagine that the child Helen Brit- ton ran up and down a rocky beach collecting plastic bits, metal parts, stones and all the flotsam and jetsam that washed up into her world. It is as if she will now spend the rest of her life re-creating those sunny days and vast starry nights for us. Not just the intimate visuals but the feelings as well.Though abstract, the use of imagery hints at a storyline; in the objects she uses I see childhood: curiosity, joy, pain and love.Wishes and dreams. Sadness.A sense that there is little division bet- ween the world we live in and the one we came from. Helen’s work is built up from the washed up detritus of our collective memories. Each piece is an enchanted world intended to bewitch us into finding the beauty and story in things that were forgotten.
With over a decade of higher education, Helen Britton still maintains an autodidacts approach to her work. Ambitious, contemplative and intensely absorbed in the process, she attains technical acuity as she needs it; asking a question and then finding and making the answer. This passion to always continue learning and growing and an almost athletic outlook on her work sustains her. Born of a country that has strong emo- tional and physical ties to its indigenous culture both good and bad, past and present, she searches for the physical remnants of culture around her, for the intimate objects that strand on the shores of our lives. German glass pressed or blown in the early postwar period by disregarded hands, collections of plastic parts pilled up and long forgotten in a warehouse in the United States. By bringing these pieces together she finds them again, cares for them, loves them and gives them a new life and home.That the work goes out into the world and be worn, handled, breathed on and cared for is the completion of the original idea. The imagery! Horses, owls, shimmering diamonds, devils, chains, sharks, knives. The color! Robust oranges, buttery yellows and neon green take a seat next to institutional gray and matted steel. It is the stuff of childhood nightmares and dreams.
She is inspired by the structures and patterns she sees around her and raises and re-constructs then over again, building up a grammar all her own.A conceptual bin she can dig through and employ. The patterns give her work a sense of continuity and hint at a desire to map and document the surface.Through this mapping, a language is created and the work is intentionally infused each step of the way by her hand.That the piece becomes jewelry and when activated on the body, transforms the wearer is an extension of the venerable tradition that human touch and symbol can imbue people and objects with the power of transcendence.
Contemporary jewelry, in its purest sense, is an object of adornment that is intended by the artist to transform the wearer. Jewelry contains an authority well beyond its objectness and this ability to transform the wearer makes it a rich, intimate and exciting art form. In the role of observer rather than maker, wearer or academic there is the unique opportunity to see this transformation take place.When someone puts on the work of Helen Britton, fixing a brooch just so or clasping a necklace and lifting up their eyes to look in the mirror, the person sees himself or herself as fiercer and more potent than they were a few seconds before.The objects she makes takes on a value above and independent of the material universe from which they come.There is in the end, little separation between the work that is made, the person who makes it and the one who wears it.
