2013 – 'the monsters we make' – Sean O'Connell – 4-22 June

4th – 22nd June 2013.
Celebration drinks Saturday 8th June 3-5pm
Artist talk – Friday 14th June 3:30pm

a small exhibition of jewellery that has wiggled, crawled, stumbled and rolled away from the maker, enforcing a will all of its own….

“my work is about many things, and is often so simple that it is purely about the joy of making.  this show in particular is about some recurring designs that seem to have taken a virulent hold on my imagination, and don’t seem to intend to let go anytime soon.  i seem to recreate them endlessly, intrigued with their forms and patterns, while at other times frustrated with their repetitive rigidity.

i draw on my own obsessive nature, the need to lock down facts and ideas, and also the ability to free it all out, open to a more fluid movement, a movement that hopefully brings a naive smile to the face of the wearer.  i often try to change my way of working, to bend my will to less rational delights, to less preconceived plans, to less tortured processes of making, but, somehow i am always drawn back to these tight modes of making, preferably in the hardest of materials.  in their shapes, my work draws on perfect ideals, mathematical harmonies and clean circular forms – whole and complete.  yet so much hand-work means that these perfect forms are less like a precise computer drawing, and closer (though nowhere near as beautiful) to the ideal perfection of a flower opening to the morning sun – however skewed, chewed on by insects, crowded, or otherwise compromised, it is always joyously, wondrously, wonkily alive.  it is my hope that in making such fiddly precise forms by hand, that i can start to move towards this grander perfection of the infinitely beautiful imperfect world in which we live”.

– Sean O’Connell

Sean O’Connell lives and works in Bundeena, a suburb in the middle of the Royal National Park, just south of Sydney.