Images of mysterious faces, stately architecture and unidentified gardens form the centrepieces of Bettina Speckner’s work. The soft grey, monochromatic tones of the etched photograph in its silver setting infuses the work with a certain pensiveness, even melancholy, which invites our contemplation and encourages us to weave our own narratives around it. The elegant simplicity of the box, with its adornment of cabochon moonstones, is both a new work and an old one, evoking the bygone era of the Arts and Crafts movement from the early twentieth century. Speckner’s work is a rumination on the nature of memory. It encapsulates the preciousness of time by capturing and preserving images of a world that shows itself to be utterly subject to the cycles of time. SE