Helen Britton is arguably one of Australia’s most celebrated jewellers, perhaps better known in Europe than on our home shores. She won the Herbert Hofmann Prize in 2005 (Germany), considered one of the highest honours in contemporary jewellery, and a full-length feature documentary about her, Hunter From Elsewhere, premiered at Dok-Fest in Munich in 2021.
Her work is in demand all over the world – not just in bespoke jewellery galleries, but commanding in their presence in contemporary art museums.
It is not surprising then, she is being celebrated as part of the Australian Design Centre’s ‘Living Treasures: Masters of Australian Craft’ series, with the recently opened survey exhibition Helen Britton: The Story So Far.
Today based in Munich, Germany, Britton was in Sydney for the launch of this exhibition – and you can understand why entering the space. This is not just an exhibition of whimsical worn adornments in cases or on mannequins.
Britton offers anything but a standard delivery – pulling on her multidisciplinary practice as a photographer, a painter and installation artist to allow viewers to find a connection and wonder in the exhibition.
The foundation to this exhibition is the home of her great-aunt and Godmother Kath Carr, on the Clarence River on Ngunitiji, Yaegl Country (NSW Northern River) where Britton visited from 2017-2019 taking over 700 photographs.
A small selection of these presented in a salon hung for the work My Godmother’s House (2018-2025), where vignettes of shell collections and curiosities in glass cabinets offer the through-line to incredible pieces of worn art.
Continuing this domestic theme, curtains are echoed screening out the passing traffic; the patterns of shells are drawn onto the windows; furniture peppers the space – a chest of drawers that has been hand painted with jewellery in its drawers; a closet filled with curiosities and treasures from Britton’s childhood, and a retro kitchen table and chairs to sit down and peruse Britton’s monograph – considered part of the show.
The message here is one of slow looking – slow consideration of life’s smallest gems drawn from everyday and offered as a kind of circuit breaker to life that streams by just outside.
Helen Britton: rebooting how jewellery is exhibited
You are probably thinking, well where’s the jewellery? It’s there, but in true Britton style, worn objects are presented (and rightfully so at this level) as artworks. As she says in her monograph: ‘We are Art and we are Jewellery. Same thing really.’
A great example is the tondo-shaped installation, The Big and The Small Things, 2025, which combines framed drawings and framed necklaces and brooches on velvet backings. Many of these pieces are made with Galalith (a hard plastic made from casein – milk protein – and formaldehyde), and you get the sense that there is an environmental message without it being too heavy handed – what is left behind, and at what cost is our impact?
Visitors start to recognise that everything is considered – the material choice, the individual elements, and the display.
This takes on steroid proportions with Britton’s installation The Magic Cupboard, 2025, which repurposes a 1914 Australian wardrobe as a wunderkammer, replete with childhood detritus and archival and new works spanning 1986-2025.
On the floor sits an old travelling chest – the kind used on sea voyages of yesteryear – and displayed on top collected seashells form a necklace. Within sight of it, is a necklace that hangs on a pillar in the gallery – held aloft by a velvet covered branch. Titled Junkyard 3 2025, it’s made from Britton’s studio leftovers from a series of works that explored her industrial home of Newcastle. Raw detritus becomes covetable, wearable beauty.
The gallery space is painted with tones nostalgia of the 1950s – soft yellows and greens. No detail is overlooked.
Among the highlights of pieces is a cuff of Galalieth bones – Whose bones are these? 2024 – and another Gathering 2023, with seahorses that seemingly dance freely when worn. The animal world is never far away in Britton’s menagerie of object considerations. Britton’s remind us that jewellery can also be fun.
What is key to this exhibition, is the way that details and images drift across the space connecting points of reference – such as an etched lire bird on the cupboard’s mirrors picked up from an image in her godmother’s photos or a shark’s jaw drawn onto the backside of the chest of drawers, a surprise treasure reflecting the ‘real’ treasure elsewhere. Britton actively weaves the viewer into these histories.
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And, engaging with the exhibition, there is a tone of voyeuristic zeal – it’s imbued with magic – and invites slow time of the viewer. To be curious, to get lost, to imagine, to smile and to lose ourselves in sheer pleasure through objects.
This is more than an exhibition – or an exhibition of jewellery – it is a reboot of our childhood sense of awe for the world and a consideration of the objects that made us.
While for Britton these things are intimately bound up in locations and family – it is deliciously layered, unexpected and enduring (a bit like life itself), and embraces the belief that worn artworks have the ability to carry narratives forward.
What I love about Britton’s approach is that this is not exclusive to the wearer of her pieces of her jewellery, but by presenting them through an installation vernacular, makes jewellery a liveable consideration for all.
Helen Britton: The Story So Far is showing at the Australian Design Centre, Williams Street Darlinghurst (Sydney), until 1 October.
The exhibition will tour in 2026 across four states, and is accompanied by a stunning monograph.
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