'Artist of the month'......June 2021
'Voice' of this month on Lost In Jewellery Magazine is artist
Helen Britton
Helen Britton is a Multidisciplinary Australian artist based in Munich, Germany. Her practice creates jewellery and objects, drawings, stencils and installations, and is informed by popular culture and folk art, disappearing traditions on the backdrop of a strong underlying influence of her natural Australian environment. Helen 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 Studio in Munich with David Bielander and Yutaca Minegishi. 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 Förder Preis of the city of Munich, and in 2014 was artist in residence at Villa Bengel in Idar-Oberstein. In 2017 Helen created the exhibtion "Intersticies" at The Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, UWA, Western Australia - a complete overview of her practice in conjunction with the Festival of Perth, including her large scale drawing works, Ghost Train installation and a selection of small sculpture and objects. In 2019 Helen Britton was made adjunct Professor of RMIT University in Melbourne. In 2020 Helen was invited by the Bavarian Chamber of Crafts to curate Schmuck for the International handwerksmesse. In 2021 Elena Alvarez-Lutz released her documentary film Hunter from Elsewhere, AJourney with Helen Britton at Dok.Fest Munich.
"Jewellery is just one part of my practice - I consider myself as a multidisciplinary artist and integrate all forms that are appropriate into my work. I am of course very well know for my jewellery, but this is not my first or only passion. I consider jewellery a form of expression because of its unique possibilities to integrate and change the appearance of individual wearers and to have a free and autonomous life in the world outside on the bodies of fellow humans."
Helen Britton
"Jewellery is just one part of my practice - I consider myself as a multidisciplinary artist and integrate all forms that are appropriate into my work. I am of course very well know for my jewellery, but this is not my first or only passion. I consider jewellery a form of expression because of its unique possibilities to integrate and change the appearance of individual wearers and to have a free and autonomous life in the world outside on the bodies of fellow humans."
Helen Britton
BRIEF INTERVIEW WITH THE ARTIST
Where is your inspiration coming from ?
The life I live.
What are you trying to communicate with your Artwork?
My experiences.
Which material do you prefer to use and why ?
The material most appropriate for the experience I am trying to communicate.
How much value do you give to researching material for your creations?
Very valuable – because we are all part of the material world it is very important to understand the language of the material we connect with – their history the consequence of working with them – what they have to say in their raw form – where they have come from, where they are going – this is essential understanding – my work is a dialogue about my place in the material world and all our histories intra-connected.
Is it more important for you the process, or the final Artwork itself?
I don’t make a hierarchy here – the conversation with the materials, the work in the studio is very important, but equally so that the work can independently communicate over time without me.
Is there an Artist you prefer & admire and why ?
Phyllida Barlow and Luc Tuymans – they are very inspiring for the many levels of communication they generate with their work.
Have you ever thought to collaborate with other Artists , or do you like to work on your own?
I collaborate for over 20 years with Justine McKnight in Australia – we have made many great bodies of work together and are currently working on a major new group of pieces that we will exhibit in 2023.
Where do you feel you are at with your last Art collection?
The Exhibition at Antonella Villanova is very balanced – I could show my practice in its entirety in a beautiful and considered way.
Helen Britton
The life I live.
What are you trying to communicate with your Artwork?
My experiences.
Which material do you prefer to use and why ?
The material most appropriate for the experience I am trying to communicate.
How much value do you give to researching material for your creations?
Very valuable – because we are all part of the material world it is very important to understand the language of the material we connect with – their history the consequence of working with them – what they have to say in their raw form – where they have come from, where they are going – this is essential understanding – my work is a dialogue about my place in the material world and all our histories intra-connected.
Is it more important for you the process, or the final Artwork itself?
I don’t make a hierarchy here – the conversation with the materials, the work in the studio is very important, but equally so that the work can independently communicate over time without me.
Is there an Artist you prefer & admire and why ?
Phyllida Barlow and Luc Tuymans – they are very inspiring for the many levels of communication they generate with their work.
Have you ever thought to collaborate with other Artists , or do you like to work on your own?
I collaborate for over 20 years with Justine McKnight in Australia – we have made many great bodies of work together and are currently working on a major new group of pieces that we will exhibit in 2023.
Where do you feel you are at with your last Art collection?
The Exhibition at Antonella Villanova is very balanced – I could show my practice in its entirety in a beautiful and considered way.
Helen Britton
Ephemeral Phenomena
Ephemeral Phenomena
Pictograms constructed in stone. They formed on my table almost by themselves; while sliding the piles around animals and insects and flowers appeared, like watching clouds or reading tea leaves. What to do? As we consume our planet, deplete the quota of resources earlier and earlier each year, it is difficult to justify the production of even more things. All I can do is carefully use up what I already have. These stones were collected over my lifetime, many surplus or seconds, cut by hands that can no longer be paid to do the work, in such masses that they still lie around in piles on tidelines of human activity, specific geographic locations resulting from trade shifts and economic failure. Some shapes meticulously formed by remarkable crafts people, thin and fragile and delicate, a contradiction to the materials they are made from. Some cut long ago, in a world that no longer exists. I have started building gardens of stone, portraits of fragile little lives carefully made to last several hundred years if not longer. Reminders of what we hold in our hands, a metaphor for our responsibility. I ask of everything: Where did you come from? Who made you? What were the circumstances of your production? What changed as a result of you being in my hand now? The beautiful colours of the minerals in these rocks are not lost on me, formed in our planet millennia ago, dug and blasted from the earth to be traded, some precious, some as ships ballast, to be cut by individuals most of who's names we will never know. And all this activity for what? Materials and their tales, the trail they leave across space, time, history. And now here I am adding to their story. So let them be worn and treasured and traded and blessed for what they represent, and for the metaphor they contain.
Pictograms constructed in stone. They formed on my table almost by themselves; while sliding the piles around animals and insects and flowers appeared, like watching clouds or reading tea leaves. What to do? As we consume our planet, deplete the quota of resources earlier and earlier each year, it is difficult to justify the production of even more things. All I can do is carefully use up what I already have. These stones were collected over my lifetime, many surplus or seconds, cut by hands that can no longer be paid to do the work, in such masses that they still lie around in piles on tidelines of human activity, specific geographic locations resulting from trade shifts and economic failure. Some shapes meticulously formed by remarkable crafts people, thin and fragile and delicate, a contradiction to the materials they are made from. Some cut long ago, in a world that no longer exists. I have started building gardens of stone, portraits of fragile little lives carefully made to last several hundred years if not longer. Reminders of what we hold in our hands, a metaphor for our responsibility. I ask of everything: Where did you come from? Who made you? What were the circumstances of your production? What changed as a result of you being in my hand now? The beautiful colours of the minerals in these rocks are not lost on me, formed in our planet millennia ago, dug and blasted from the earth to be traded, some precious, some as ships ballast, to be cut by individuals most of who's names we will never know. And all this activity for what? Materials and their tales, the trail they leave across space, time, history. And now here I am adding to their story. So let them be worn and treasured and traded and blessed for what they represent, and for the metaphor they contain.
The Rage of Dekoration
The Rage of Dekoration
What have we got here in this work? Symbols of love and violence, power, trust, humour and wisdom. A lucky charm, an amulet. Hope. Themes of popular culture, the essence of pop songs in solid form. They are illustrations or collages of cheap trinkets and components, but the sentiment they convey reaches into the deepest abyss. I see in these works all the effort, joy and failure of our existence. They seek to stand in for, in the most unpretentious way, everything that has driven our species since time immemorial. The subjects 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.
I have sifted these fragments and symbols out of the history of humanity, out of my own history, drifting around the planet, travelling with me, collecting along the tidelines of human activity and all landing in my private collection. There are great piles of these products all glittering and jittering, giggling, glinting and snarling. I am keeping some of them safe in my studio, preserving their humble stories, turning their likeness into Art. Left over cases of love, hope and despair stacked in mouldering boxes in disused factories and the warehouses of vintage component dealers. How did they come about? What were the circumstances of their production? Did they change anything? Did they help? The things I choose often come from periods in time where their subject matter and production is so intimately entwined in the political and social histories of their day that these fragments cannot help but to convey some of this story. Western utopian dreams driven by a very specific set of controls, where the production of the perfect trinket was given precedence over the protection of the environment of the actual thing being immortalised in glass and plastic. Will the trinkets be all we have in the end?
I collect and draw costume, souvenir and children's jewellery and the components used to make these products. I focus on these genres because they are the least restrained by the pressure of expensive production. They are naive and direct, clumsy but authentic - a kind of art brut in the best case, and lets face it, its very easy to make jewellery. The drawing series started many years ago, a kind of documentation with focus on accurate, reduced pictograms, the few simple clear coloured lines sufficing to convey the subject. Over the years through this process I have developed my own complex symbolic visual language which has gone on to generate new versions of the jewellery objects and components that were the subjects of the original sequence of drawings.
Driven by curiosity, sentimentality, compassion, and empathy, I also recognise in this work that I am a part of the broad continuum of human inventiveness and creativity, with my own utopian dreams of hope and luck, perhaps more so now than ever.
What have we got here in this work? Symbols of love and violence, power, trust, humour and wisdom. A lucky charm, an amulet. Hope. Themes of popular culture, the essence of pop songs in solid form. They are illustrations or collages of cheap trinkets and components, but the sentiment they convey reaches into the deepest abyss. I see in these works all the effort, joy and failure of our existence. They seek to stand in for, in the most unpretentious way, everything that has driven our species since time immemorial. The subjects 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.
I have sifted these fragments and symbols out of the history of humanity, out of my own history, drifting around the planet, travelling with me, collecting along the tidelines of human activity and all landing in my private collection. There are great piles of these products all glittering and jittering, giggling, glinting and snarling. I am keeping some of them safe in my studio, preserving their humble stories, turning their likeness into Art. Left over cases of love, hope and despair stacked in mouldering boxes in disused factories and the warehouses of vintage component dealers. How did they come about? What were the circumstances of their production? Did they change anything? Did they help? The things I choose often come from periods in time where their subject matter and production is so intimately entwined in the political and social histories of their day that these fragments cannot help but to convey some of this story. Western utopian dreams driven by a very specific set of controls, where the production of the perfect trinket was given precedence over the protection of the environment of the actual thing being immortalised in glass and plastic. Will the trinkets be all we have in the end?
I collect and draw costume, souvenir and children's jewellery and the components used to make these products. I focus on these genres because they are the least restrained by the pressure of expensive production. They are naive and direct, clumsy but authentic - a kind of art brut in the best case, and lets face it, its very easy to make jewellery. The drawing series started many years ago, a kind of documentation with focus on accurate, reduced pictograms, the few simple clear coloured lines sufficing to convey the subject. Over the years through this process I have developed my own complex symbolic visual language which has gone on to generate new versions of the jewellery objects and components that were the subjects of the original sequence of drawings.
Driven by curiosity, sentimentality, compassion, and empathy, I also recognise in this work that I am a part of the broad continuum of human inventiveness and creativity, with my own utopian dreams of hope and luck, perhaps more so now than ever.
Artist Helen Britton 'Knives' Photo Dirk Eisel
Il Giardino Scuro. The Dark Garden. 2020 by artist Helen Britton
A project with Galleria Antonella Villanova
I am a gardener by instinct; the work involved in maintaining and encouraging natural growth cycles a source of profound tranquillity. And when the work is done, the garden is my place to rest.
My own country was once a massive garden, perfectly maintained by its rightful owners who had tended it for over 60,000 years. Without the care and understanding of First Nations People, the country I too call home will not know equanimity.
Last summer colossal fires destroyed 18.6 million hectares of Australia. 3 billon animals died or were displaced. Lives were lost, often by those trying to fight the blaze, homes, properties, histories all consumed by the forewarned consequence of the Eurocentric mismanagement of the land. The helplessness and grief I felt while watching this happen changed me and how I work. Wisdoms despair, knowing why but not knowing what to do. Structures imposed by colonial and imperial regimes centuries ago have built the specificity of this moment, through a belief system that only gives power, autonomy, agency, rights to specific members of the living world. All the battles we are fighting in 2020, including the fires, are a consequence of this.
So what is the work I need to make? For myself, for the planet, for history? How do I trace this moment of absolute crisis for generations to come? What will be left? What will be my legacy? In the myths of civilization a constant symbol is the garden, from Eden onwards to Paradise, commodified in tourist advertising; palm trees, lemon trees, eucalyptus trees with Koalas perched in their branches - an exquisite animal who will by 2050 only survive in captivity. What drives us to yearn for a garden pure and do everything possible to ensure that such a place can only exist as an exclusive luxury for those who can afford it? The irony of this time for many of us is that we long for a space of human and natural harmony and are complicit in a system that is highly detrimental to the realisation of that vision. Like the rapidly fading posters from the time of travels, a time suspended indefinitely, the chance of creating a sustainable garden on earth retreats into the smoky dusk.
In some places Jewellery is still worn to signal loss, a way to communicate that sensitivity should be observed, that the wearer has a difficult time. I find resonance with this idea right now, and have created The Dark Garden, a drawing in metal, stone and paint, of the delicate residue of a personal paradise reduced to ash. A drawing and simultaneously jewellery; brooches and pendants; emaciated flowers, the keys of lost homes and the angry knives of rage. Fragments of onyx, tiger-eye and agate, carefully formed by hands that could not now be paid to do such work and discarded in a country that struggles to value its heritage because of its past. A melancholy work balancing loss with courage and hope, with a longing for true beauty, dedicated to the year 2020.
But The Dark Garden is not finished. It is part of new body of works, an exhibition that should be opening in a week. An exhibition that was for Galleria Antonella Villanova and myself an anchor of hope in a year of turmoil. The storm of 2020 is relentless, but we remain agile, and this exhibition must happen later, in a time more sheltered. As a bridge until then, this garden will evolve, following the seasons and offering a new vision with the northern hemisphere spring.
Please join us over the next months as the project develops and we cultivate a symbol of hope for our future.
"Helen Britton, October 2020"
------------
Galleria Antonella Villanova Foiano Italy, Antonella Villanova
Curators Domitilla Dardi & Marco Bazzini
Open Now until 15th September, Finissage 2nd October
A project with Galleria Antonella Villanova
I am a gardener by instinct; the work involved in maintaining and encouraging natural growth cycles a source of profound tranquillity. And when the work is done, the garden is my place to rest.
My own country was once a massive garden, perfectly maintained by its rightful owners who had tended it for over 60,000 years. Without the care and understanding of First Nations People, the country I too call home will not know equanimity.
Last summer colossal fires destroyed 18.6 million hectares of Australia. 3 billon animals died or were displaced. Lives were lost, often by those trying to fight the blaze, homes, properties, histories all consumed by the forewarned consequence of the Eurocentric mismanagement of the land. The helplessness and grief I felt while watching this happen changed me and how I work. Wisdoms despair, knowing why but not knowing what to do. Structures imposed by colonial and imperial regimes centuries ago have built the specificity of this moment, through a belief system that only gives power, autonomy, agency, rights to specific members of the living world. All the battles we are fighting in 2020, including the fires, are a consequence of this.
So what is the work I need to make? For myself, for the planet, for history? How do I trace this moment of absolute crisis for generations to come? What will be left? What will be my legacy? In the myths of civilization a constant symbol is the garden, from Eden onwards to Paradise, commodified in tourist advertising; palm trees, lemon trees, eucalyptus trees with Koalas perched in their branches - an exquisite animal who will by 2050 only survive in captivity. What drives us to yearn for a garden pure and do everything possible to ensure that such a place can only exist as an exclusive luxury for those who can afford it? The irony of this time for many of us is that we long for a space of human and natural harmony and are complicit in a system that is highly detrimental to the realisation of that vision. Like the rapidly fading posters from the time of travels, a time suspended indefinitely, the chance of creating a sustainable garden on earth retreats into the smoky dusk.
In some places Jewellery is still worn to signal loss, a way to communicate that sensitivity should be observed, that the wearer has a difficult time. I find resonance with this idea right now, and have created The Dark Garden, a drawing in metal, stone and paint, of the delicate residue of a personal paradise reduced to ash. A drawing and simultaneously jewellery; brooches and pendants; emaciated flowers, the keys of lost homes and the angry knives of rage. Fragments of onyx, tiger-eye and agate, carefully formed by hands that could not now be paid to do such work and discarded in a country that struggles to value its heritage because of its past. A melancholy work balancing loss with courage and hope, with a longing for true beauty, dedicated to the year 2020.
But The Dark Garden is not finished. It is part of new body of works, an exhibition that should be opening in a week. An exhibition that was for Galleria Antonella Villanova and myself an anchor of hope in a year of turmoil. The storm of 2020 is relentless, but we remain agile, and this exhibition must happen later, in a time more sheltered. As a bridge until then, this garden will evolve, following the seasons and offering a new vision with the northern hemisphere spring.
Please join us over the next months as the project develops and we cultivate a symbol of hope for our future.
"Helen Britton, October 2020"
------------
Galleria Antonella Villanova Foiano Italy, Antonella Villanova
Curators Domitilla Dardi & Marco Bazzini
Open Now until 15th September, Finissage 2nd October
'The Dark Garden' an exhibition by artist Helen Britton at Galleria Antonella Villanova, Foiano Italy
Photo credit: Bruno Bruchi
Photo credit: Bruno Bruchi
The Bright Garden
"At the end of 2020 The Bright Garden was initiated with Galleria Antonella Villanova. I had just finished creating The Dark Garden, a drawing in metal, stone and paint, of the delicate residue of a personal paradise reduced to ash. A drawing and simultaneously jewellery; brooches and pendants; emaciated flowers, the keys of lost homes and the angry knives of rage. A melancholy work balancing loss with courage and hope, dedicated to the year 2020.
At the time we decided that The Dark Garden should continue its evolution as part of a new body of works, to bridge the difficult space of the second postponement of the exhibition and of winter, waiting for the possibility to show the work analogue, when we could be together again.
Spring arrived in Munich with what one could only call force. The temperature jumped 30 degrees in a week, the unfrozen city parks erupting with crocus. We had battened down the hatches for months as the rage of the virus took its toll on our freedom, our spirt and so many lives. The sun brought the ground to life, this moment we had looked forward to, thinking by then we must be in a better space. How wrong we were. In the radiant spring light we saw a world battered and damaged and still in deep trouble. The garden comes to life regardless, my work evolving with somber determination. There is hope but the storm rages on.
Now at the end of the coldest April in decades, we wait in lockdown still. The evolution of this work entangled itself with our hopes and fears for this time, no longer the symbolic gesture of a clear bright space of colour and lightness, overwhelming the melancholy of The Dark Garden, but its own autonomous, parallel but connected world of tumultuous life in the storm.
In the end we have two gardens in dialogue, telling their stories of hope and despair."
Helen Britton
"At the end of 2020 The Bright Garden was initiated with Galleria Antonella Villanova. I had just finished creating The Dark Garden, a drawing in metal, stone and paint, of the delicate residue of a personal paradise reduced to ash. A drawing and simultaneously jewellery; brooches and pendants; emaciated flowers, the keys of lost homes and the angry knives of rage. A melancholy work balancing loss with courage and hope, dedicated to the year 2020.
At the time we decided that The Dark Garden should continue its evolution as part of a new body of works, to bridge the difficult space of the second postponement of the exhibition and of winter, waiting for the possibility to show the work analogue, when we could be together again.
Spring arrived in Munich with what one could only call force. The temperature jumped 30 degrees in a week, the unfrozen city parks erupting with crocus. We had battened down the hatches for months as the rage of the virus took its toll on our freedom, our spirt and so many lives. The sun brought the ground to life, this moment we had looked forward to, thinking by then we must be in a better space. How wrong we were. In the radiant spring light we saw a world battered and damaged and still in deep trouble. The garden comes to life regardless, my work evolving with somber determination. There is hope but the storm rages on.
Now at the end of the coldest April in decades, we wait in lockdown still. The evolution of this work entangled itself with our hopes and fears for this time, no longer the symbolic gesture of a clear bright space of colour and lightness, overwhelming the melancholy of The Dark Garden, but its own autonomous, parallel but connected world of tumultuous life in the storm.
In the end we have two gardens in dialogue, telling their stories of hope and despair."
Helen Britton
Artist Helen Britton
