“For O’Connor, jewelry presents a contrast between texture and smooth surfaces. He has experimented with various forms of casting, including cuttlefish bone, which leaves a porous imprint on the metal. He also favors reticulation, a method of texturing metal by dusting it with minute particles of silver or gold and then heating the piece until the granules become part of the surface, and mokume, a Japanese technique of laminating metals to create a surface for repousse design. He is an expert at laying metal until it looks like crinkled paper. Most recently, O’Connor has inlaid pieces of granulated metal in rock as one more exercise in the study of surface differences. A favorite stone of his is spectrolite, a feldspar discovered in Finland in 1938 that appears opaque and dark upon first observation. When the light strikes it at 30 degrees, it takes on brilliant hues of green and blue. While O’Connor does not do lapidary, he selects his materials carefully, even traveling to mines in Finland for the spectrolite he uses in his work.”
