Helen Britton is one of the most influential and eloquent artists working in contemporary jewelry today. Originally from Western Australia she received her Master of Fine Arts from Curtin University including studies at the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam, and San Diego State University, California. She currently works and lives in Munich, Germany. Since completing her postgraduate study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich her work has been seen in museums and galleries around the world.   Her work is held in the public collections of LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), National Gallery of Australia, The Pinakothek der Modern, Munich, The Schmuck Museum Pforzheim, The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Museum of Fine Art Boston, The Metropolitan Museum, New York, The Hermatige, St Petersburg and The Victoria and Albert Museum, London among others. In 2005 Helen was awarded the Herbert Hofmann prize for excellence in contemporary jewellery and in 2006 the state prize of Bavaria for craftsmanship. In 2013 at the invitation of The Neue Sammlung, Munich, an overview of 20 years of Helen’s work was shown as a solo exhibition in the Neues Museum, Nürnberg, Germany. In 2013 Britton was awarded the Förder Preis of the city of Munich, and in 2014 was artist in residence at Villa Bengel in Idar-Oberstein. In 2015 Helen Britton was Artist in Residence at Vasse Felix in Western Australia. In 2017 Helen presented a mid-career retrospective entitled Intersticies at The Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, UWA, Western Australia in conjunction with the Festival of Perth.

It is not hard to imagine that the infant Helen Britton lay in a cradle looking up at a mobile of plastic parts floating above her and will spend  the rest of her life trying to recreate that object and more importantly, the feeling it gave her.  In the abstracted and simultaneously narrative plastic objects she uses we see childhood: curiosity, joy, pain and love. Wishes and dreams. Sadness. A sense that there is little division between the world we live in and the one we came from. Helen’s work is built up from the 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.

Helen Britton has an autodidacts approach to her work. 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. She has stated that she does not consider herself an Australian jeweler – or at least that she doesn’t identify as one.  To agree with this is to dismiss what to me is so unique about being born of a country that has strong emotional and physical ties to its indigenous culture both good and bad, past and present. Wherever she is she relates to things that have been lost. She searches them out.  German stones carved in the 1940’s by disregarded hands, collections of plastic parts pilled up and long forgotten in a warehouse in the 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. Instead of counting sheep to fall asleep I imagine she sees dazzling carousel horses jumping the gate and galloping out past the fairground to the fields.

Surface patterns infuse her much of her work and not unlike the way Aboriginal forms and configurations of symbols give spiritual significance to a wall, the sand or the body, the patterns give her work a sense of continuity and hint at a desire in the artist 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 become jewelry and when activated on the body, transforms the wearer is an extension of this same Aboriginal thought, that human touch and symbol can imbue people and objects with power of transcendence.

Within the story of art there is long history of artists manipulating our understanding of the real and unreal, the transcendent and the grounded. Look at a 16^th c Spanish painting of Christ bloody and doe eyed on the cross, become lost in an Anish Kapoor sculpture of deepest ocean blue. The intention of the artist is that these works elicit a response from the viewer that propels them into seeing and feeling something that before was unknowable. They are transformed.

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 the half-second 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.

Sienna Patti, 2014.