Michael O'Connell's Pots Rethinking craft, architecture and modernism

Michael O'Connell (1898-1976) was a pioneering Anglo-Australian textile designer who produced Australia's first commercially successful hand-printed textiles between 1930 and 1937, the year he returned to England. How he came to establish his textile studio in Melbourne which had no history of printed textile design, is the subject of this paper. The paper examines two projects from the 1920s which formed O'Connell as a craftsman; the building of his concrete block house Barbizon in Beaumaris (1924) and the development of concrete garden furniture as a field of design and craft practice. The paper argues that the fundamental act of building his own house, of placing himself in the world, was the trigger from which O'Connell's practice and identity as a craftsman flowed and that it was as a craftsman he made the transition into textile design.