|
Planning and organising an environmental dialogue What the container concealedScrap has always fascinated Gitte Helle, who creates jewels out of the things other people throw away. Pioneering work for brooches The basis for Gitte Helle's droll, decorative sculptures is pictorial art, which she also works with in her own right. The idea is to open people's eyes to the beauty and originality of things that have been wrecked and scrapped. Since 1991, Gitte Helle has had her own gallery, Container Juvelen, where she makes and sells her unique, signed creations – particularly brooches and lamps – and scrap angels for Christmas. She makes them from plastic animals, cans, old typewriter keys, antique nails, keyholes and beer caps from the nearest street corner. "The brooch is greatly undervalued," says Gitte Helle. "That is a shame because it is a wonderful piece of jewellery. A necklace or a pair of earrings can only be used in one way, but a brooch is flexible. It is much more interesting because it is a sculpture in mini-format. A picture that can be moved around on one's body." At first, it was mostly 80-year-old women who bought Gitte Helle's brooches, but that did not deter her. "I have a forte there and was so sure about what I was making that I just kept on." A piglet in a beer cap Today, Container Juvelen's customers are typically 50-year-old, well educated women. Gitte Helle says, "One has to have achieved a level of maturity in one's life to appear with a suckling pig in a beer cap. It is breaking new ground to wear something like that because you yourself like it – and not care a fig about what anyone else thinks." Gitte Helle wants to give a gentle shake to the mass psychosis that makes people want to have and wear what everyone else has and is wearing. "When people pay 500 kroner for a mass produced necklace of poor quality, it is not the necklace they are buying, but certainty that they look like everyone else, that they have good taste." Recycled again and again Container Juvelen can quite literally be used as a jewel box. Gitte Helle has invented a subscription scheme in which subscribers can exchange brooches or lamps as often as they like for one year. The idea occurred to her because she herself used to go round the shop before going to a party to find just the right piece of jewellery to go with that red dress. And she thinks that others should have the same possibility. In a use-and-throw-away time, that idea is incredibly simple and liberating.
(Caption) "I like things that can be used for something. Pure sculptures have never appealed to me."
|