Debris from the Dreams of Our Parents

Helen Britton and I were born the same year, 1966, at the beginning of the end of an era of giddiness; she on the east coast of Australia, and I in Southern California, on opposite shores of the Pacific Ocean. It had all become too much, the land grabs, the space race, the plastics, the artificial flavourings that promised to be better than nature. Glimpses of commercial success, the once bustling worksites, the sun shimmering on the sea, now revealed a hollowed-out emptiness, job scarcity, and the disintegration of life under water’s surface. Evidence of lost dreams lay all around us. Did our parents care about the damage? The childhood pain of too much abundance, yet not enough; the disappearing insects that no longer smashed on our car windshields; the mounting dysfunction and pollution. We knew. There was a sad truth in what remained.
 
And yet, I always thought this was my secret. When I first saw Britton’s work, I knew I wasn’t alone. There is a longing we share for the secure place we never really had – what happened and what could be learned? Could the metal scraps and amusement parks answer that? Did the animals know? The relentless pursuit of sleuthing out what transpired became the plight of those who showed up to the party too late. Humour and hope were essential to the search, because what was the choice? GenX, the cohort to which Britton and I belong, was the first generation to spot the dystopic future of tomorrow, gazed upon from the receding shoreline of that idyllic post-war feeling.
 
So, what were we supposed to do with this imperfect, eroding world? There were clues for us latchkey kids in what remained to make sense of our existence. Things of substance in need of our attention lurked in the shadows, cast off, restricted by locked doors. The truth lay hidden within them.

Britton’s photography and cement sculptures speak to this puzzle residing in our collective unconscious. Life’s lack of harmony captures her imagination: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs behind iron bars; a large, fluffy, stuffed animal dog, once a child’s favourite, now abandoned in the streets; nature overtaking the bright blue plastic lining of what was once a family swimming pool, a scene so aggressive you can hear the weeds drowning out the splashing sounds of the children who used to play there. She recasts these images as embodied clashing mashups – cement hotels for koalas, concrete valleys for trees, planters unable to contain greenery, a goat lurching into a cement slab. It leads to cynical laughter. Is existence really that fragile? Is love so fleeting? Can memories be so easily forgotten? Britton awakens us to the inanity.

I first became aware of her work through the Industrial series consisting of patterned metal rings, bracelets, and necklaces – sharp, hard, and edgy, yet infused with technological imagination, as if props from a science fiction film. Barrels filled with gasoline once carried on the back of trucks, commercial excavators no longer used, rivets and stamped-out patterns of unidentified architectural elements: these are reborn through her eyes as miniature ornaments. She reminisced about them in the documentary, Hunter from Elsewhere: A Journey with Helen Britton (Alvarez-Lutz 2021), and how they left her gobsmacked as a child. Defining her horizon with a silvery brown haze, she nonetheless saw their grotesque beauty, and didn’t want to forget. As ornaments to wear on the body, though: was she recontextualising them as friendly childhood shapes, or did they carry a sense of dread we should heed? Are they key elements to the mystery of our current reality? She orders them back into our existence, holding these opposing viewpoints.

I have empathy for materials, feeling sad for the discarded and broken things of the everyday … I try to provide them with a new opportunity, a chance to sing again or to sing at last, Britton writes. She respects the oddments of the past, realising them as harbingers of our contemporary situation. Methodically, she learns everything there is to know about them – how they were made, by whom, and why – and then creates a respectful place for them to live out their days. She ensures that the narratives they embody will not be lost to history. The brooch Poison Garden, for example, contains a piece of vintage black glass engraved with a Jolly Roger she found during one of her shopping excursions. Planted inside a flower, rendered in silver and pearls, the initial reading of the skull and crossbones is that the blossom is poisonous. But a deeper dive reveals the shard was made by Sudetendeutschen artisans whose fates were doomed after World War II. She rescued their story and surrounded it with funereal beauty.

The glass industry conceals many heart-breaking tales that Britton brings to the fore, the ‘Lead Girls’ from Lauscha, Germany, the saddest. The birthplace of glass Christmas ornaments, Lauscha glass decorations were in high demand in the mid-1800s, with large orders coming from US department stores, particularly Woolworths. Founder Frank Winfield Woolworth, credited for making the shiny baubles holiday staples in America, discovered them on a trip to Sonneberg, Germany – a town some nine and a half miles from Lauscha. Desirous of a better marketplace, Lauscha craftsmen loaded their inventories on the backs of their wives, who travelled to Sonneberg on foot to save money. As an additional cost-reducing measure, ornament producers used lead oxide to make the glass shimmer, a cheap substance they gave to poor local girls to heat and blow into the ornaments with straws. As more and more tinkling trinkets hung on American Christmas trees, these young women succumbed to lead poisoning before the age of thirty.

In the shadow of the Lead Girls, Britton had glass ornaments made based on her drawings for her jewellery, particularly birds, horses, wolves, and ravens. She hand-fabricated elaborate nests and encasements of silver and sometimes diamonds for these, transforming them into precious objects. The ornaments are treated as if they are the finest items on earth, rather than fashionable decorations from US excess. Britton’s meticulous and thoughtful interventions reveal her veneration for them and their once makers, a nod which counters their previously reckless treatment. Through the perfection of her metal frames, she aims to soothe life’s tragedies while bearing witness. The sorrowful consequences of the Lead Girls metastasize in our hearts.

Even the most gleeful items can have a backstory, which Britton’s eyes reveal. The Dekorationswut series, for example, is a jubilant collection of delectable plastic shapes that look good enough to eat: yellow taffy, juicy orange blooms, milk drops, candy corn, pink incised beads, and bows of every size. She sets these into precisely executed structures of her own creation. The series is charming, sugary, and safe, akin to a Donna Reed episode, until you learn from her photographs these components are deadstock leftovers from back in the day, crammed into US warehouses for decades. The overabundance invites a melancholy to set in, like eating too much cotton candy at a carnival. A simple plastic moon becomes a threat. How long until the waste will overcome us? What can we do to reverse the story, change our fate? The Dekorationswut series is a memento mori to narcissistic joy, desire without a care in the world. As she observed, it’s "utopian dreamtime." We sit with the feelings.

Objects seem to appreciate Britton’s embrace, rewarding her with their magical energy. Horses gallop, leaving a spray of gemstones in their wake, while flower-shaped pins shed leaves in anticipation of the next spring. Oversized good luck charms, scary black cats, and even the knives of circus performers animate due to her care. The world of things is a creative safe space for Britton, providing a place to dream, to grow, to work out anxieties, nightmares, and reveries, in a way the real world just doesn’t accommodate. In the wake of Covid-19, climate change, seemingly constant warfare, and the rise of dictators across the globe, GenXers couldn’t stop that world we sensed in our childhood prescience from manifesting. Britton retreated into the depths of her mind. The materials that needed her, she now needed to save her from her turbulent thoughts. Within this context, her irrepressible sense for the comedic intact, it was no coincidence that the most expressive body of work of her career emerged: big, furry, flamboyant, slobbering monsters (!), ‘funny works for tough times.’ Consisting of drawings, objects, and jewellery, I saw these in New York, and they were serious works of contemporary art, puffed up antidotes for a fucked-up era. The characters leapt from her Technicolor dream closet: a drooling mythical creature with massive Cheeto-hued eyes; an electric yellow pissing canine with a hot pink tail, a greened-out owl, and stately gold poodles standing on translucent amethyst spears. Britton’s exasperation lassoed absurdity to aid her in her protest about what she – and we – were witnessing. With these works, the decoding of objects encouraged by discarded things is to a castoff generation a well found place to thrive. This time, though, it was our story that was embedded in the material. It’s prophetic that our generation, the last of the analogue world, grew up needing to trust the tangible to make sense of our disordered existence. Not time, not space, not the largest ocean on earth can separate us from our united faith in objects. The physical exposes the complexity of life to those like Britton, brave enough to point out the contradictions and forge a path forward with them.
 

About the author

Barbara Paris Gifford is Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, Craft, and Design at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in New York City. She oversees MAD’s renowned jewelry collection and has organized over twenty-five exhibitions, including Jewelry Stories: Highlights from the Collection 1947-Now (2020–ongoing), for which she edited a comprehensive catalogue. Most recently, she presented Out of the Jewelry Box (2024–6), an exhibition and catalogue exploring the intersection of Queerness and contemporary jewelry, and Douriean Fletcher: Jewelry of the Afrofuture (2025–6), examining jewelry’s role in character development in film. As a jewelry and fashion expert, she has authored and presented on these topics for various publications and venues.  Gifford holds an MA in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture from the Bard Graduate Center, NY.

Email: Barbara.Gifford@madmuseum.org
Instagram: @barbaraparisgifford