A Peek into the Assortment of Artist Helen Britton

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Artist Helen Britton has collected jewellery since she was a baby rising up in Australia. She nonetheless has most of the items she adored in her childhood, resembling a tiny painted deer that she felt “was alive” when she was a woman.

“I’ve all the time been fairly within the very naive, easy, mass-produced issues which have a unusual design,” says Britton, who lives in Munich and spends a part of every year in Australia.

An internationally famend artist, Britton has received the Herbert Hofmann Prize—thought-about the best honor in modern jewellery—and has had exhibitions everywhere in the world. She was the topic of the 2021 movie Hunter from Elsewhere.

Relating to deciding on jewellery for her personal assortment, Britton is especially drawn to animals, and he or she loves jewellery that makes her snort.

Britton attended the Academy of Effective Arts of Munich with New Zealand jewellery artist Lisa Walker, and so they lived subsequent door to one another for a number of years. Walker’s lobster brooch was a part of a commerce—Britton gave her good friend one among her drawings.

“I believe one of many nice luxuries of being an artist is having the ability to swap for work with artists you want. I do it fairly often,” Britton says.

The red-and-white plastic lobster is stitched over and connected to a chunk of velvet. “It’s improbable to put on—it’s daring and clear, and it molds to your physique,” she says. Walker is understood for utilizing secondhand gadgets and nontraditional strategies to problem notions of what’s treasured.

“I adore it as a result of it’s not symmetrical,” says Britton. “Twenty-two years in the past, folks weren’t making jewellery like this. Lisa is a pioneer.”

This silver slug (at left in photograph above) is without doubt one of the first in an extended line of slugs made by David Bielander, Britton’s husband. “I put on it loads,” says Britton. “Folks snort, folks scream, it has great social interactions, which is commonly what jewellery does.”

The 2010 winner of the Herbert Hofmann Prize, Bielander is understood for his visible puns and sleight of hand, resembling making gold items that seem like cardboard.

The silver brooch is the “offspring” of the slug prototype (at proper in photograph above), which is fabricated from copper. Britton doesn’t put on that one “as a result of it has historic significance. David was making this work at a time when figurative work wasn’t trendy. It was fabulously humorous.”

This brooch was a part of a swap in 2006 between Britton and Octavia Prepare dinner, a New Zealand jewellery artist who incessantly makes narrative work. The brooch, fabricated from Perspex, acrylic, and silver, is signed “Prepare dinner & Co,” which is the fictional household jewellery firm that Prepare dinner invented as a automobile for her work.

“It’s simply hilarious to put on one thing that claims $8,000,” Britton says. “It’s sort of random. If you happen to put on it, you find yourself having numerous foolish conversations.”

For nearly 30 years, Britton stored a golden pure pearl from west Australia in a field: “It’s so treasured, I’ve by no means identified what to do with it,” she says. Then she met Japanese jewellery artist Shinji Nakaba, who is understood for carving pearls, seashells, and gem stones utilizing an historic course of referred to as glyptic artwork. His beautiful carvings embrace a cranium on a pearl stud earring and shells carved within the form of the feminine physique.

Britton gave Nakaba the pearl and requested him to carve “somewhat face, like a moony face” on it. The piece, accomplished in 2022 as a pendant, is called Moon Boy.

Britton was captivated when she noticed this brooch at The Jewellery Library throughout NYC Jewellery Week in 2023. As she admired it, Jewellery Library founder Karen Davidov mentioned she had coveted a appeal depicting a tin of tuna that Britton had made for an exhibition, and requested if Britton would make her one. “She pressed the horse into my fingers—I used to be so touched,” Britton says.

The brooch is a superbly made piece of costume jewellery with a tail composed of chains, a physique of pressed brass, and coloured glass stones for the horse’s head. It evokes the numerous depictions of horses in Britton’s personal work, particularly in her work and drawings.

Britton retains the piece on the wall beside her mattress. “It’s an unbelievable reminiscence,” Britton says. “It encompasses a lot—being again in America after the pandemic, which made me so blissful, and Karen’s generosity and kindness, that gesture of, ‘I would like you to have this.’”

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