Sean O'Connell

Bundeena, New South Wales, Australia

Sean’s studio can be found on the New South Wales coast, in the middle of the Royal National Park, just south of Sydney. The ceiling of the studio is bright orange and it’s a short stroll to the rocky coast. From this studio Sean makes jewellery that evokes the beauty of a perfectly engineered and constructed machine. He studied Jewellery and Object Design at the Australian National University as well as Gold and Silversmithing at the Sydney College of the Arts.

Drawing inspiration from sources as diverse as Andrei Tarkovsky, Amon Tobin and Dr Seuss, Sean’s contemporary jewellery is an abstraction of the forces that are present in his life and self. His work employs stainless steel, tantalum, gold, ball bearings and engineering bits and pieces crafted by a metal lathe, a TIG welder, a 3-phase metal linisher and a hammer among other things…the work that results is an elegantly simple expression of form and movement. In Sean’s own opinion, his pieces fall somewhere between being jewellery and tools.

Other artists

Jewellery by Sean O'Connell

Journal: Sean O'Connell

One of the richest qualities of jewellery is its intimate potency. When it is strongest, a treasured piece of jewellery is a small blinding spark of personal significance, a night star by which to navigate, a marker that tells us from where we have come and to where we are going. There are only two things in my life that are like that (besides people)—music and picture books—and because music is impossible to talk about, I am also going to share some of my most potent and intimate picture books in this post….

Read the rest of this article

Journal: Sean O'Connell

Plants and mushrooms are very inspiring. In the ground they are perfect little creations, balanced shapes and patterns that are in perfect harmony with their environment. They are the biggest inspiration for my jewellery, their basic forms like a template for beauty, their structure like a map of forces that flow though them as they grow and live. And on the plate they are divine, subtly cooked in combinations to happily fill the belly.

Read the rest of this article

Journal: Sean O'Connell

Oma, my grandmother, is an intense old German lady. She cooks a mean kartoffelpuffer (potato pancake), likes to save money by re-using postage stamps, voted for Pauline Hansen (she thinks that immigrants should go back home, somehow forgetting she was also one), thought Adolf Hitler was right (about who knows what), and taught me to whistle real loud with my fingers (she was a tomboy!). Incidentally, my grandfather taught me how to make fart noises under my armpit in the shower—a real classy couple, my grandparents.

Read the rest of this article

Journal: Sean O'Connell

“And it is not just physical torture—spending days alone at the bench drinking too much coffee and talking to your hammer because there is no one else, the myopia of extended concentration upon one small spot in space gradually taking its toll, the smallest things becoming all encompassing, the devil in the detail cackling as you chase ever finer scratches in the pursuit of a perfect mirror polish…. It is like a drug: sometimes you just get all tangled up and have a bad trip, becoming deeply unsettled…”

Read the rest of this article

Sean O'Connell on tantalum, mechanical engineering and alpacas...

“I want to make with my own hands…I have no interest in getting pieces made for me, singly or in bulk. Sitting at the bench and creating is where the magic of the handmade object is situated: the subtle adjustments of form, the irregularities introduced by the hand…”

Read the rest of this article