Sean O’Connell

Sean O’Connell’s studio is high up in the Central Plateau of Tasmania, overlooking the shores of yingina, the Great Lake. Running off-grid in his small workshop, Sean makes clean minimal jewellery that blends the austere beauty of the subalpine landscape, with the clean lines of carefully engineered machinery. He studied Jewellery and Object Design at the Australian National University and completed a PhD at Sydney College of the Arts.

Drawing inspiration from sources as diverse as Andrei Tarkovsky, Pan Sonic and Dr Seuss, Sean’s refined jewellery is an attempt to include far too many influences, and also to reduce all that overwhelming wonder down to its bare essentials. His work employs tantalum, stainless steel, gold, bearing balls, and other materials, subtly hand-crafted through machine work and traditional jewellery tools. 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.