Helen Britton

Block and Flowers

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Previously exhibited at Basel 2022.

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Description/

In Helen Britton’s studio, little cement sculptures have taken shape, architectures that intermittently reveal pieces of the floral porcelain so dear to our tradition (I’m thinking Capodimonte) and that we remember embellishing items in our grandmothers’ houses; colorful flowers in mainly pastel tones, the symbol of a simple, fragile, old-fashioned femininity, often secreted in a little necklace or the stone set in a ring passed down from mother to daughter.
Shards of porcelain animate those cement pieces like women animate the streets of our deserted cities; women who struggle to break free, and who the lockdown has made prisoners. Looking out from little windows, they hold on, yearning for light, for freedom.

Helen Britton

designer

Helen Britton is an Australian artist who has lived and worked in Munich for over 20 years. After completing her MFA by research at Curtin University in Western Australia, Helen studied under professor Otto Künzli at the Academy of Fine Art, Munich, as part of a post-graduate study project. In 2002 she established her own studio in Munich and is currently Adjunct Professor at RMIT University, Melbourne.

Helen has developed a reputation as one of the world’s most noted contemporary jewelers. Her work is informed by her experience of the vast and layered history reflected in the built environment, as she meticulously constructs pieces using precious metals, glass, stones, and occasionally collected components. As well, Helen’s work is a meditation on her own history as she engages with artifacts that act as powerful triggers to memory and association.

Major institutional exhibitions of Helen Britton’s work have been presented at Lawrence Wilson Gallery, Perth (Interstices, 2017) and the Neues Museum, Nuremberg (The Things I See, 2013). She was awarded the Förder Preis of the city of Munich in 2013. Helen’s jewelry is found in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of Western Australia, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The Boston Museum of Fine Art, the Neue Sammlung, Munich, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam among others.