Michael O'Connell's pots: Rethinking craft, architecture and modernism

When Michael O'Connell returned to England in 1937 after a seventeen-year absence in Melbourne, he did so as a promising up-and-coming modern textile designer. Within a year he was exhibiting publicly and had at least three designs on display at the 1938 Ideal Home Exhibition with Harrods, Ian Henderson's and the London School of Interior Decoration. These so impressed the young Xan (Alexander) Fielding that he published a review of O'Connell in Decoration. This piece contained a potted and somewhat fanciful biography of the designer but it was clear that the work impressed: "The three fabrics which I had admired [had] one thing in common - an element of the primitive. Some of the designs are based on native and animal life; some are subdued; some are barbaric; nearly all are highly colourful, yet they harmonise perfectly with sophisticated surroundings." How did O'Connell, a newcomer to the well-established British textile scene, do it? How had he established his career in Australia, a country with almost no history in this field of design prior to 1930? This paper attempts to answer the question by examining in some detail events in the 1920s which led to O'Connell's transition to textile design in 1930.