EXPO ‘cornucopia’ – Sienna Gallery, Lenox (USA) – 10 Aout-3 Sept. 2012

HELEN BRITTON : dekorationswut:cornucopia

opening reception August 11 5-7pm
artist talk August 12 11am

« …Violence, love, riches, sentimentally, humour, wisdom, the exotic, the precious, the rare; a friendly small companion, a lucky charm, an amulet. Hope. The small and the large refrain. While the components themselves are in the form of the cheapest trinket, the sentiment that they intend to convey reaches into the deepest abyss. Primal concerns. These components have come bubbling out of the history of humanity and have drifted around the planet collecting along the tidelines of human activity.

There truly are great piles of these kinds of components, stacked boxes full, all glittering and jittering and demanding attention with their giggle, their glint, and their snarl. These accumulated inhabitants of the jungle of material emotions. How did they come about? What were the circumstances of their production? Did they change anything? Did they help? Where did the impetus come from to embark on their production?
I see in these components all the effort, humour, joy and failure of our existence. They seek out in the most unpretentious way everything that has driven our species since time immemorial, right back down to plastic versions of shells so very similar to those found in the Blombos cave, strung together 70 thousand years ago.
All this trailing baggage of history and theory, I leave at the door of my studio. It clutters. The concept has been long since internalized. The components will continue to tell their stories anyway, so for me they then become raw materials that challenge and stretch my powers of creation. The work in the studio is a process of direct, intuitive, integration and construction, an open-ended experiment. I am not trying to dictate what the work will then say. I am conscious of what I have chosen to incorporate, but am completely immersed in my own process of reinvention and creation that lies well outside the limited boundaries of verbalization.
Curiosity, Sentimentality, Compassion, Empathy. Recognition of the continuum of human inventiveness and creativity. It’s all about the great cornucopia of jewellery. Jewellery, containing this and now waiting to be worn…«    Helen Britton, 2012

Artist Helen Britton completed a Master of Fine Arts by research at Curtin University, Western Australia in 1999, which included guest studies at the Academy of Fine Art in Munich, the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, and San Diego State University in California. In 1999 she completde a postgraduate study project at the Academy of Fine Arts with Professor Otto Künzli. Her work is held in the National Gallery of Australia, in the Pinakothek der Modern, Munich, the Schmuck Museum Pforzheim and in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, among others. The recipient of both the Herbert Hofmann prize for excellence in contemporary jewellery and the state prize of Bavaria for craftsmanship Britton has exhibited internationally in group and solo exhibitions. This is Helen’s first solo exhibition in the United States.

All works 2012, Plastics, steel, silver, glass.

 

 

Sienna Gallery
80 Main Street
Lenox, MA 01240