The director of the design archives at RMIT in Melbourne, Edquist had become interested in Michael O'Connell after shows about modernism in Australia. O'Connell's Pandemonium, a linocut and woodblock frieze printed on silk, is in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, and RMIT holds a few fragments, including one showing women dancing, rhythmic and flowing.
"This piece is really fantastic, obviously influenced by the School of Paris, and Matisse, and I thought it was interesting," Edquist says of that dancing women design. "When you show people his work, they all find it so lively and exhilarating.
"Gradually, I came to think he was a more interesting artist than just about anyone else at that time, and that's been lost." Edquist's curiosity about O'Connell increased when she began sifting through Australian home and design magazines from the 1920s and 30s. At that time, led by the architects, designers and textile artists at the Arts and Crafts Society, a modernist taste and sensibility infiltrated the homes of Melbourne's society.
O'Connell was a member of that group, but it was the sophisticated, well-travelled women of the society whose energies galvanised what Edquist came to understand as a movement that has been underestimated in art histories to date.
She began to challenge the consensus view that Australian modernism began in Sydney in the 1920s and was not taken up in Melbourne until the 1930s.
As O'Connell moved from writerly aspirations to garden furniture and decoration, then on to what would become his signature -- hand-dyed and printed textiles -- around him were people such as Fred Ward, making modern furniture, and Ola Cohn, creating modern sculpture. Edquist didn't hope, or expect, to shed the kind of light on O'Connell's career she began to believe he deserved.
"There was a general feeling that there were not sufficient archives," she says. "When I visited the studio at The Chase (in Hertfordshire, where O'Connell lived for three decades and where he died in 1976), I didn't really expect to find anything else."
At the invitation of the Henry Moore Foundation, which owns O'Connell's former property adjacent to Moore's Hoglands, she also met the artist's son, who gave her the best news she could have hoped for: some work and records had in fact survived, and they were stored in London.
"Lo and behold, there was a collection of textiles that had survived all the rigours of the fire that destroyed his studio, and in another corner, there were boxes of stuff, including diaries, lots of photographs and notebooks. I knew I had a project."
This did not mean it would be an easy project. The record was patchy, and also O'Connell was an artisan, domestic in his interests.
Edquist says she is fascinated by such marginal careers, and the work of someone whom history records as peripheral, a footnote, but whose intensity and influence during their lifetime belies that cursory judgment.
For the book that accompanies an exhibition of O'Connell's work at the Bendigo Art Gallery, Edquist details with impressive thoroughness a narrative of his career, but says she has steered clear of filling in tantalising gaps in the record.
"One always knows more than one puts in the book," she says. "It's a matter of crafting a book about a career, not a biography . . . I wouldn't presume to know someone from the documentation which is so fragmentary. But one has to suppose he was a fairly charismatic man."
O'Connell was born in Lancashire in 1898, brought up by his mother following the death of his father in 1900 from typhoid. He trained as an officer when he left school in 1916, and went to war soon afterwards, joining a regiment on the Western Front that was captured and interred in Germany during 1918.
Edquist doesn't comment much about what it might have meant for the young Michael to head off in 1919 for a sojourn in Australia, first to an experimental farm in Wagga Wagga, then on to Melbourne, where he based himself for the next 17 years.
Starting by taking photographs and painting watercolours, O'Connell's definitive step was to hand-build a house at Beaumaris, then a sleepy holiday village on Melbourne's outskirts.
This was in 1923, so O'Connell had been in the country for only a few years. Edquist says that by choosing to buy a block of land and pitch a tent in the same area Arthur Streeton, Frederick McCubbin and Tom Roberts had worked in the 1880s, he was "paying homage to its rich cultural heritage." There is a photograph of young O'Connell sitting on a wicker chair on a timber deck outside a tent; it's impossible to know how long he might have chosen to live that makeshift life if it had not been for a pernickety health inspector, who condemned the tent as a health risk and ordered it pulled down. O'Connell complied but built instead his Barbizon.
"Robin Boyd later wrote a fair bit about Beaumaris as a little hotbed of innovation in architecture, but I don't think he knew about O'Connell's Barbizon, which was the precursor of all that," Edquist says. "Barbizon was really the first modernist house in Melbourne. I have no explanation as to why he built it, and not, say, a Californian bungalow. It was extraordinary."
Barbizon was eventually destroyed in a bushfire in January 1944. Photos show how it must have looked, in 1925, to the neighbours who peered through the high wooden fence at this plain concrete structure, the functionality of which was complemented by classical and floral motifs, reinforced by a garden setting adorned with concrete pots and ornaments made by O'Connell.
For the next decade, until he and his wife Ella went back to England, O'Connell developed both his range and his expertise, working with garden designer Edna Walling on exhibitions for the Arts and Crafts Society, and by trial and error, learning about dyeing textiles and printing methods.
In 1934, art historian William Moore wrote a History of Australian Art in which he called O'Connell a "master craftsman" who "ranks among the best artists in Australia . . . One gets more stimulus from a display of his fabrics than from many an exhibition of pictures."
O'Connell had intended to return to Australia, but kept in England by World War II, he settled there, building The Chase (again, with his own hands). That was where he eventually shot himself after a car accident that convinced him he had lost his mobility. Along with failing eyesight, this meant he could no longer work as he had done all his life.
"It's a grand story, tragic, but also very rich," Edquist says. "It was a gift for me, to find that archive, because this was a life perfect to write about, with so many tentacles into so many other areas. Is there another story out there like it? I don't think so."