Helen Britton
Jeweller
Published: 17.04.2024
mac.comBio
Helen Britton completed a Master of Fine Arts by research at Curtin University, Western Australia in 1999, which included guest studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam, and San Diego State University, California. In 1999 she returned to Munich to complete postgraduate study at the Academy of Fine Arts. In 2002 she established her workshop in Munich with David Bielander and Yutaca Minegishi. Her work is held in the National Gallery of Australia, The Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, The Schmuck Museum Pforzheim, The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Boston Museum of Fine Art, The Metropolitan Museum, New York, The Hermitage, St Petersburg, 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 March of 2011 Helen Drutt-English launched a new catalogue of Helen Britton’s work in Munich. 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 Förderpreis of the city of Munich, and in 2014 was artist in residence at Villa Bengel in Idar-Oberstein. In 2015 Helen Britton was invited by Ingo Maurer to make a solo exhibition of her “Industrial” series of jewellery and drawings in his showrooms in Munich, and was Artist in Residence at the invitation of Janet Homes a Court at Vasse Felix in Western Australia. In 2017 Helen has been invited by The Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, UWA, Western Australia to make a complete overview of her practice in conjunction with the Festival of Perth.Statement
What have we got here in this work? Violence, love, riches, sentimentally, humour, wisdom; a friendly companion, a lucky charm, an amulet. Hope. The small and the large refrain. Themes of popular culture, the essence of a pop song in solid form. While the figures themselves draw their shapes from the cheapest trinket, the sentiment that they convey reaches into the deepest abyss. I see in these works all the effort, humour, joy and failure of our existence. They are rough signifiers, visually reduced and emotionally condensed. They are also private icons, some accompanying me from my earliest memories, others invested with my own associations, sifted out of the chaos of possibility through fitting into my hunting pattern. We all live in hope and want luck, more than ever at this point in history.Helen Britton, Munich, 2016.
Along side this, from amongst the blur of daily impressions certain pictures manifest clearly and stop me in my travels, I photograph them regularly, these strong images - the supermarket, the half assembled fair ground, the chunks of roller coaster, the building site, fragmented images from the general debris of high density living. I observe in these places potential to combine materials to form structures and concoctions- this is a real source of wonder, I see this all around me, and it is this transformative process that brings about an intense fascination. That I make jewellery, drawings and paper objects and not fun rides, buildings or gardens is a good thing, because I am building in a way a very private world, that accepts no compromises. The scale of my work allows my full range of fantasies without requiring communication and without leaving a legacy of public monstrosities - instead I leave these modest little machines and landscapes for wearing. My practice is accumulative, experimental and heterogeneous, faithful to my life experience. It is also a conscious dialogue with matter, form and ideas.
I create in my work collisions of design, Baroque, reduction resistant assemblages. There is a lot of pleasure here, and also a measure of aggression seeking it’s meaning in the present, walking directly out of my lived daily experience. Making jewellery, I play out the tensions and beautiful collisions of my practice in a small complex space. I am happy to think that these little things then find their way back out into the world and into peoples daily lives. I like the idea that they too will become worn and at some point perhaps even discarded, returning to be crunched again through the great geological and chemical machines of the universe, in an act of infinite transformation. These objects are romantic, but also explorative and direct; collisions of elements from the chaos and order of lived experience.
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