Amber Girl (2015)

Bettina Speckner combines strong graphic forms – a pierced human profile and the oval of a traditional brooch – with photographic imagery and applied three-dimensional natural objects to produce her jewellery. Much of her work incorporates small Victorian photographic portraits. Typically, she uses unique and cheap tintype photographs taken in the US in the 1860s and 1870s – arguably the forerunners of the photo-booth strip, the Polaroid or the ‘selfie’. The subjects are anonymous and appeal to Speckner as graphic images rather than for any nostalgic value. She also uses images of animals and landscape, and photographs that she has taken herself. There is an emphasis on flatness and her work is suffused with an air of melancholy. 

Speckner’s jewellery is made with skill and mastery of traditional techniques, and with attention to the detail, both on the front and the back of pieces. She uses pearls, coral, diamonds and coloured stones. She challenges our perception with her photographic imagery and combination of materials – it makes her work highly contemporary and thought provoking, deliberately open to different interpretations.

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