For the month of June, Kitty Lees selects an archival brooch by Breon O’Casey, whose work she grew enamoured by while living in the same Cornish town the artist once called home.
Sun, moon and stars. They are shapes we recognise; ones that come out every day and night in various forms.
Breon O’Casey’s Sun, Moon and Stars brooch brings these familiar elements together in a small, balanced composition. The brooch holds a tiny constellation: a bronze circle, a bent silver twirl, and a wobbly gold line. Behind them are traces of twinkling stars and planets pushed into hand beaten silver.
O’Casey lived and worked in St Ives, Cornwall, where the night sky is untouched and often shows off the stars in their various patterns. The stars feel close here, not distant or abstract, and the sun and moon are part of daily observation. This sense of proximity runs through much of his work.
His move to St Ives in the late 1950s placed him within a community of artists including Terry Frost, Denis Mitchell and Barbara Hepworth. He worked as an assistant first for Mitchell and later Hepworth, but also developed his own practice across sculpture, painting, weaving and jewellery. Across all these disciplines, he returned to the same visual language: simplified forms, references to the natural world, and symbols that are familiar but never always appear slightly differently.
His initial interest in jewellery came, in his own account, from seeing some drawings of jewellery by Alexander Calder. Calder’s jewellery, like his sculptures, offers a sense that form can move and hang in space. This idea became an important reference point for O’Casey, whose own jewellery is built around that a sense of sort-of balance.
Things appear in threes across O’Casey’s work. He made a boat in bronze with three sails, an etching of three ripe pears, a woodcut of three fish in red, white and black. His use of simple numerical groupings in painting and design, treating them as a way of building rhythm and structure. Here, the sun, moon and stars are arranged as they might appear overhead: in a manner that, like the night sky, is quite unpredictable.
There is a phrase of his that feels close to this way of working: “there is nothing new under the sun, but an affinity of arrangements.” It describes exactly what the brooch does. Familiar elements, arranged instinctively, becoming something slightly unfamiliar again.
