Helen Britton: The Things I see

Artist list

Helen Britton

… Love, wealth and sentimentality, humor, wisdom, violence and hope – seen in all their banality and yet likewise in all their depth. Sometimes it is something exotic, precious or rare, sometimes an amulet and talisman – these are the paradoxical emotional worlds and everyday things that Munich-based Australian Helen Britton (born 1966) explores and which she traces in her jewelry objects. She combines semi-finished products from the fashion jewelry industry, found objects from flea markets or strolls along the beach back home in Australia with components and structures she makes herself from metal, with gems, glass elements from Lauscha, with lacquer and plastic. And the result is something completely new, influenced not least by its industrial processing and origins. These objects are freed from the memories they nevertheless always possess, and are ready to be placed in new contexts. Dipped in the most refined of color symphonies, the jewelry objects Britton makes are thus very personal. Indeed, she comments: “I am building in a way a private world that accepts no compromises.”

From the outset, the graduate in fine art in Britton-the-jewelry-artist draws the jewelry objects. Parallel, independent analyses of her artistic output arise, morph into pictograms, gaining the status of mnemonic symbols. The result is a quite unprecedented graphic documentation of jewelry objects and how they were developed. Substantially these are rarely just draft design drawings and are instead parallel, independent analyses of the artistic domain in which she is active. Clear, simple lines reduced to the essentials, to the characteristics of a jewelry object and lent abstract form – these then become pictograms that take on a life of their own in the everyday world and function as mnemonic symbols.

An exhibition of Die Neue Sammlung – The International Design Museum Munich (a museum run by the Free State of Bavaria) – together with the artist in cooperation with Neues Museum für Kunst und Design in Nuremberg. 

Organizer: Die Neue Sammlung - The International Design Museum Munich
Curator: Dr. Petra Hoelscher