At the core of Britton's practice is a profound engagement with materials and their histories: not just precious metals and stones but also humble or discarded materials such as recycled plastics, glass fragments, shells, bones and everyday trinkets. She selects materials not for intrinsic value but for what they signify, and her work is often described as a dialogue between personal memory and cultural narratives.

Britton’s jewellery is distinguished by its conceptual depth and material diversity. Her work is simultaneously playful and introspective — ranging from brightly coloured brooches and necklaces to assemblages incorporating vintage components — yet it often carries critical reflections on history, popular culture, human anxiety and environmental degradation. For example, The Rage of Dekoration explores symbols of love, hope and despair embedded in cheap trinkets, while her residency project Wildstone investigates the geological and human histories of stone and industrial jewellery production in Idar-Oberstein, Germany. Her practice also engages with ecological and historical themes; The Long Shadow of Time draws on porcelain, forests and religious history as metaphors for human experience and cycles of destruction and creation.

Beyond object making, Britton’s approach is reflective and accumulative: she documents her processes and finds through photography, drawing and installation, blurring boundaries between craft and conceptual art. Her work acknowledges the layered histories of materials, memory and place, encouraging viewers to consider the cultural and emotional stories embedded in the objects we make and carry. As one of the world’s most respected contemporary jewellers, Britton reveals jewellery as a human phenomenon loaded with meaning — a vehicle for connecting lived experience, cultural history and material imagination.

Robert Cook, Senior Curator at the Art Gallery of Western Australia describes Helen's works as "function[ing] as brilliantly dense ruptures in the order of the world, even as they are so clearly a part of it. They are complications and ferocious intensifications."