Sean O’Connell

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.