Helen Britton – The Morning Bark

There’s a “written world”[1] marked by punctuation and organized in words, lines, paragraphs and footnotes. It encloses poems, novels, posts, articles, short stories, all following the rules of composition and language techniques: this is the world I belong to.

There is also an “unwritten world” made of metals and stones, both precious non-precious, of wires, plastics, objects trouvés, paper, glass, wood and other different materials. This “unwritten” world is made of personal imagery, imagination and inventiveness which is like “an electronic machine takes account of all possible combinations”[2]. The “unwritten world” conveys large subjects and themes through different media and objects of various sizes; it gives voice to all sorts of fragments that are composed and recomposed following precise rules of combination and techniques: this world of contemporary jewellery.

The passing from the “written” to the “unwritten” world is as entering into a room of multiple possibilities and “Le Stanze del Possibile” aims to be the medium between these two worlds where the jewels are the fuel for words and vice versa.

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“Le Stanze del Possibile” is an exhibition project based on Italo Calvino’s “Six Memos for the next Millennium”. The Italian writer was invited in 1984 to give the Norton Lectures at Harvard University about the values of literature that he considered as a heritage for the years to come. Unfortunately, he died prematurely and the corpus of his “American Lessons” was published posthumously in 1988.

In a book every kind of experience is possible, but rarely it goes beyond the border of the page: how the values of Lightness, Rapidity, Exactitude, Visibility, Multiplicity, as well as the unfinished memo of Consistency, written by Italo Calvino can be observed through the lens of contemporary jewellery?

Read the full text via KLIMT02
See all the pieces created for the exhibition at HANNAH GALLERY BARCELONA
See all the images and video of the exhibition via here
Purchase your own copy of the exhibition catalogue at KLIMT02

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[1] For the “written and “unwritten” world see the lecture given by Italo Calvino as “James Lecture” at the Institute of Humanities on 30th March 1983: The Written and Unwritten World, “The New York Review of Books”, May 12, 1983, pp. 38-39.

[2] Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the next Millennium, Harvard University Press, 1988, p. 91.

A presto,

Nichka

“I always had empathy for objects, and in my practice in recent years, I have become more specifically interested in collecting those awkward and sometimes ugly fragments, those hidden beauties, those components that were intended for life as jewellery. I try to provide them with a new opportunity, a chance to sing again or to sing at last. I have a great clamoring collection, all demanding attention, each one such a handful that I keep them tucked away, restless in their boxes, waiting for their day to shine. Is their oily smile, their rugged gesture, the rust of their metal, the giggle of the plastics, the wink of glass, the jungle of material emotions locked in these fragments, that I am looking to give room for expression”.

HELEN BRITTON

Extract from PREMIO COMINELLI catalogue 2015, p. 14.

Helen cavallino