Bettina Speckner

I have spent many hours playing “I spy with my little eye” with my older sister in the backseat of my father’s car while we drove through the Danish landscape. Although it was considered a car game, it is possibly the worst situation to play, since the objects to be guessed are only present for a fleeting moment as the car past them by. The trick for the person guessing is therefore to pay the utter most attention to everything while the spy selects the object. Being three years younger and not willing to lose I also observed my sister’s gaze, when possible, and tried to memorize all details; three cows in the meadow, a blue water bucket, a cornfield, a seagull, the power lines cutting through the sky, a flowerbed or a pair of flipflops forgotten by the side of the road. 

Bettina Speckner’s jewellery represent such fleeting moments, a brief encounter with landscapes, beings or objects. In the work of Bettina Speckner, however, the moments are staged and forever fixed in compositions with others. A tulip is splashed with paint and diamonds, a road confused with directions by golden pointers and a vase is containing nothing but an image of another vase containing flowers. 

 

As an artist, Bettina Speckner has chosen to create objects. But something in her pieces always seems to deviate from the thingness one usually finds in objects. Each piece is made with great care, with no details left unattended, and yet each brooch appears more as a narrative than as a material thing. This is a unique quality of her jewellery, perhaps related to the fact the Bettina Speckner was a painter before becoming a jewellery artist, or perhaps it just signifies her specific train of thoughts. In conversation with Bettina Speckner it becomes clear that each used fragment represent time more than space, that materials for her are objects more than raw matter, and that the narratives are present, but consist of unknown stories, also to her. It is her distinctive perception of the things surrounding her that lead to Bettina Speckner’s jewellery. Her studio is full of fragments of stories jet to become.

 

I spy with my little eye objects passing quickly outside the car window, they exist as materials occupying space, but in the glimpse, they become mere images. In my attempt to remember them, the objects are shifting into narratives, to stories of time and things, woven together in compositions with each other.

 

 

Prof. Karen Pontoppidan