Jewellery has its mysteries, stories have their mysteries, and the love that is an essential part of jewellery also has its mysteries.
- Rüdiger Joppien
READ Bettina Speckner: Deliberations and Negotiations from Metalsmith Magazine CONTACT the gallery for more information on Bettina Speckner's work
The Beauty of the Moment: On the Jewellery of Bettina Speckner
by Rüdiger Joppien
Bettina Speckner makes nature-like jewellery, or jewellery like nature, in every respect; an art in nature, in which she takes motifs from nature as a major constituent. She favours natural elements: pearls, shells, corals, wood, but also precious stones, whether shimmering opal or scintillating diamond. So Bettina Speckner is still in the minority among her artist colleagues, for precious stones, once the heart of the goldsmith's art, have today been edged to the periphery. Many goldsmiths of the present still associate precious stones with luxury and presumptuous extravagance. Bettina Speckner is not perturbed by such thoughts, indeed responds quite without ideological bias, for she needs the colour and the closeness to nature transported in the stones in order to tell her stories. She tells something of the rich poetry of the world, she captures moments, she writes poems, as it were, with her jewellery.Photographs are central to many of her pieces. For example ferrotypes, photographs on coated iron plates for reproducing portraits, which were put in velvet-lined boxes to be given as presents to friends and relations. Once plentiful, people started collecting them intensively and they are now very rare. Bettina Speckner studied painting at first but then found her artistic home in goldsmithery. She loves these photos. She processes them by reshaping them, alienating and transforming them, thus steering our curiosity back to a nameless person on a portrait from the second half of the nineteenth century.But she also takes photographs herself and etches the pictures onto zinc plates or has them fired as enamel compositions.They show details from architecture, from life in the country, flora and the vegetable kingdom, and still life - unspectacular perspectives of nature, tranquil and serene.
In a previous catalogue Bettina Speckner availed of an apt quote from Marcel Proust: "Remembering a certain picture is the melancholy contemplation of a certain moment in time". The fragmentary element in the artist's work underlines the fact that memory is not retrievable in its entirety. She simply shows us pieces of mosaic that leave reality – as it once was – in suspended ambiguity. Many art critics have indeed intuited melancholy in the work of Bettina Speckner. Her interest in photography and plants springs from one and the same compulsion to know: the quest for the beauty of what once was, of what happened before our eyes and will never be the same again and in the end fade away.Bettina Speckner is a narrator of great sensibility, who patiently fashions her objects until she gently finds them place on the stage of life. I remember her first catalogue, remarkable in that the illustrated pieces of jewellery lay simply on table tops and the photos were out of focus, as if she had not the slightest wish to put her jewellery in the spotlight, but wanted to leave them undisturbed in their personality and intimacy. Jewellery does not have to flaunt itself, it wants to be discovered. Even today, Bettina Speckner says it is important that not everything is perfect. Her pieces are indeed perfect, but she probably means incomplete; in her eyes her works are not finished, they want to go on acting and reacting, not worked to death. Another important aspect for her is that the reverse side is also exquisitely designed, even if this ambition is almost anachronistic today. "The reverse is like a mystery belonging to the one who wears the jewellery," she says - a veiled statement of almost Arabic connotation according to the motto: costliness is that which is withdrawn from the eye of the crowd.
Jewellery has its mysteries, stories have their mysteries, and the love that is an essential part of jewellery also has its mysteries.
IT FLOWERS BECAUSE IT FLOWERS
Bettina Speckner's Garden
by Kadri Mälk
I do not remember when I first saw Bettina Speckner's work. I actually feel as if I've always known it and that I've secretly been feeling it all along. When you look at a work of art, you're looking first and foremost at yourself. Bettina Speckner's work has something to say about us as the viewer.
Much has been said about the rational and the irrational, which is simultaneously gathering strength in today's information society.
The conscious and the spontaneous in Bettina's work are amazingly well balanced. But this balance is accompanied by a fundamental vagueness which is hard to describe, resulting in a distanced, in places, out-of-focus reflection of everyday images that the artist once (in a dream? in real life?) experienced and considered to be significant. The fact that she often uses apparently banal, yet unusual photographs of everyday scenes, capriciously combining the sublime with the everyday into a sensitive coexistence, is not that important.
What is important is the confession-like quality in these works, the atypical causality, which suggests that in addition to the known causal connections there are other unexpected bridges. These can also take us to our destination, if we are willing to risk it.
Capriciousness, yes, there is plenty of that. The contour meanders through the pattern, as if it knows where it wants to arrive. But no, then it turns and goes somewhere completely different, giving us the impression that this is how it is meant to be. A world of wrong turns, which manage to convince us that this is how life is meant to be. The perpetual return of the experienced traveller. Proof that the most incompatible desires can exist side by side undisturbed.
For me I think the most beautiful of Bettina's works are her fictional portraits. The portraits, with their lost, cut-out faces, where that which is missing is more present than that which is visible. Very eloquent in this age of shouting heads.
Her cool relationship to innovation in form, and her lack of the desire to shock at all costs, also attracts attention. This jewellery is like a surface, a dimly lit screen onto which is projected a somewhat many-levelled story edged with precious stones. But depth is created after all, with the help of our imagination, because Bettina Speckner knows how to toy with us quietly, she is a meditative illusionist.
I once wrote about Bettina's work ('A Chance to be Silent', Nocturnus, Tallinn, 2002) that she is a “ flawless master of the sentiment. The roses she depicts crackle suspiciously, tiny diamonds and ripe garnets drip of melancholy. Nostalgia continues on the other side of jewellery as well, where the material viewer may not have a glance. But God may. A real garden of dimly lit alleys, a web of secret paths opens up there.”
Calm, yes, there is plenty of this in these pictures. A Vermeer-like restrained quietness, a stillness. A quiet garden, which exists independently, on the other side. A garden where 'the rose does not ask why; it flowers because it flowers' (Angelus Silesius)
Kadri Mälk
Artist Statement Regarding Technique, Bettina Speckner
For my photo-pieces I use three types of photo-techniques.
1. Photo-etching in zinc: I etch photos onto zinc plates. This technique stems from the early heliogravure printing technique. I do this myself (unfortunately no one does it anymore) and I mostly use photos I have taken myself. Sometimes I also take found pictures. For me it is important that my pictures are timeless, but the impression that I only use old, nostalgic images is deceptive.
2. Photo-enamelling: here I work with a very small company in Europe, which still knows how to perform this process. Again, I mostly use pictures I have taken myself, which they enamel for me in the cut I want.
3.Ferrotype : this is an old photo-technique, which cropped up in the US after the daguerreotype in the late nineteenth century. I find the old plates, or they were given to me, and I work on them to transform them into my jewellery.
At the same time I always produce pieces without using photography. They are just as important to me as the photo-pieces.
