“In joy or sadness, flowers are our constant friends.” - Okakura Kakuzo

Bettina Speckner’s jewelry exists at the intersection of photography, memory, and adornment. Her brooches and pendants are less about decoration than preservation—fragments of lived or imagined histories that you wear close, like quiet talismans.

Originally trained as a painter, Speckner studied jewelry under Hermann Jünger and Otto Künzli at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, bringing a painter’s sensitivity to light, surface, and silence. Since the 1990s, she has been a defining voice in contemporary jewelry, known for her masterful integration of image and object.

Photography is central to her work, but not in the conventional sense. Speckner employs a range of historical photographic processes, from heliogravure-based photo-etching on zinc to delicate photo-enamels crafted in collaboration with a small studio in Portugal. She also collects antique tintypes from flea markets,19th-century portraits of unknown sitters, which she sets like gemstones, honoring their mystery without explanation. In recent years, she’s worked with a photographer to create “alutypes”—modern versions of tintypes using the wet plate collodion method on aluminum. The result is a stiller kind of image, one marked by its long exposure and haunting quiet.

Though she often works with old photographs, her aim is not nostalgia. As she notes, “The impression that I only use old, nostalgic images is deceiving. I am interested in timelessness.” In GARDEN, this quality emerges in subtle ways—a distant landscape, a floral blur, a sense of something half-remembered. Nature is a mood, a texture, and a metaphor. These are pieces that don’t describe the natural world—they reflect its mystery and its impermanence.