Helen Britton

Munich, 2008. I am still roaming around finding things, hunting for and gathering materials, like I've been doing for years. No sea shores here though, a few river banks now and then and also heaps of junk. Europe: the residue of matter, contemporary and otherwise is exotic and plentiful, piled up in the flea markets, spilling onto the streets out of shops, being broken or discarded and crunched back into the earth for centuries. In the last years I have stopped collecting just anything to make my pieces and have now restricted myself in a non-puritanical way to reworking elements that were originally made for the production of jewellery. This seems appropriate for one so obsessed with the significance and history of decoration, these elements making a kind of double reflection, a new intensity of purpose.
Along side this, from amongst the blur of daily impressions certain pictures manifest clearly and stop me in my travels, I photograph them regularly, these strong images - the supermarket, the half assembled fair ground, the chunks of roller coaster, the building site, fragmented images from the general debris of high density living. I observe in these places potential to combine materials to form structures and concoctions- this is a real source of wonder, I see this all around me, and it is this transformative process that brings about an intense fascination. That I make jewellery, drawings and paper objects and not fun rides, buildings or gardens is a good thing, because I am building in a way a very private world, that accepts no compromises. The scale of my work allows my full range of fantasies without requiring communication and without leaving a legacy of public monstrosities - instead I leave these modest little machines and landscapes for wearing. My practice is accumulative, experimental and heterogeneous, faithful to my life experience. It is also a conscious dialogue with matter, form and ideas.
I create in my work collisions of design, Baroque, reduction resistant assemblages. There is a lot of pleasure here, and also a measure of aggression seeking it’s meaning in the present, walking directly out of my lived daily experience. Making jewellery, I play out the tensions and beautiful collisions of my practice in a small complex space. I am happy to think that these little things then find their way back out into the world and into peoples daily lives. I like the idea that they too will become worn and at some point perhaps even discarded, returning to be crunched again through the great geological and chemical machines of the universe, in an act of infinite transformation. These objects are romantic, but also explorative and direct; collisions of elements from the chaos and order of lived experience.