Ahead of the curve

DESIGN:Self-taught furniture designer Joseph Walsh is making waves on international markets, with his curvilinear, sinuous creations. DEIRDRE MCQUILLANtracks him down in his Co Cork studio to discuss his new work

‘IN HIS HANDS wood can do or be anything he wants.” So said one of South America’s leading architects Rafael Vinoly last month after acquiring a spectacular table at the Design Miami fair made by young master craftsman Joseph Walsh. Vinoly paid $145,000, setting a record price for one of the Cork-based designer’s works.

The table, a 20ft bravura piece of flamboyant and sinuous curvaceousness in ash that took a team of six nearly two years to complete, sold on the first day of the event and is destined for Vinoly’s new residence in Uruguay. The architect referred to Walsh’s “extraordinary skills and rhapsodic imagination – his objects explore the hidden essence of the material”. Fast becoming one of the most sought-after Irish designers internationally, this year will see Walsh’s star continue its meteoric rise.

It took nearly three months to catch up with him at his studio, a converted potato barn on the family farm in Riverstick near Kinsale. He had been travelling almost continuously to the US, Miami and Milan, where he is working on a major installation commission for Swarovski to celebrate the 10th anniversary in April of its Crystal Palace exhibition. In New York, Walsh took part in the Material Poetry exhibition highlighting 21st-century Irish design at the American Historical Society. For a person under such pressure, Walsh (31) is surprisingly at ease as we walk from the yard to his design studio, separated from the workshop by a wide, open passage in the same building. Inside, another outstandingly beautiful table made of ash and sycamore is in its final stages of completion for a client in Tel Aviv.

One of a family of nine, Walsh, who is self-taught, started learning about woodwork at the age of eight from his grandfather James Duignan. “It was his hobby and he had worked with marquetry and the more he saw my interest, the more tools he would give me,” he recalls. “I started with fret saws and then coping saws and I have this incredible appetite for solutions – I was really curious then about how to make dovetail joints.”

There was a history of furniture making in the family – his grandfather had cousins who made furniture and exported to the US at the turn of the last century, although Walsh knows little about them. What became clear, however, was that as he grew up, working with wood became something that brought fulfilment and happiness and any money he had went straight into tools. “Those early years were finding a way. Design doesn’t daunt me. Learning something new always feeds back into my work,” he says.

At 12, he could make a dresser and at 15 got his first commission – seating for a bay window – and by 16 he was working full time. But it was on a visit to London at 17 with his mother and aunt that he discovered the work of celebrated English furniture maker John Makepeace at the Geffrye Museum, which changed his life. “It opened up another world for me. I began to see a bigger picture and potential. At the time furniture was all functional, but the level of expression in Makepeace was very different. It opened up in me an ambition and an aspiration to become more expressive in my work.”

His inspiration comes from the natural world around him and living in rural Ireland is important to him. “It allows you to be quite focused,” he says. Explaining his approach to his work, he talks of the way in which time shapes our environment, how layers of wood record time and how time shapes those layers. His relationship with wood is strong and familiar. “I use Irish and French ash. I like ash’s open grain, it’s a humble material and you don’t have preconceived notions of its grandeur.”

His acclaimed curvilinear canopy bed from his Enignum series, which took two years to complete, was based on the idea of a cocoon and although it references the four poster, it was designed like a shelter and was photographed draped in veils of white silk organza. The reaction in the US was ecstatic, with many describing it as a fairytale creation.

Many of his pieces, like this, have a sense of fluidity and movement, created by their free-form laminated curves. “Laminating plays a big role in creating forms,” he says. “You are basically manufacturing materials – and because it is relative to the wood’s elasticity and down to growing conditions and growth rings and age, the end result can only be unique.” The paleness of the wood and white oiled finishes add to a feeling of lightness in the finished objects.

Walsh founded his studio in 1999 at the age of 19, and a turning point came when he organised an exhibition of Irish furniture by Irish designers in Fota House in 2003. This established him for the first time as a designer rather than a vernacular furniture maker and led to a commission for a dining table and 20 chairs for the Japanese Embassy in Dublin as well as the acquisition of one of his pieces by the National Museum of Ireland. In 2006 he was selected along with 14 others to exhibit at Sculpture Objects and Functional Art (Sofa) in Chicago, a significant step in his career and the first of many design art fairs at which he continues to show. Up to then, 90 per cent of his work was for Irish clients; now more than 97 per cent is for export.

Interest in design art, a commercial phenomenon since 2006, has increased and Walsh has won not only valuable commissions from these fairs, but also recognition from important international collectors such as Wendell Castle, the father of the art furniture movement in the US, and John Bryan in Chicago, one of the most important collectors of contemporary crafts in the US, to whom he sold his first piece in 2007, an olive ash rocking chair called Suaimhneas. His career is moving fast. Next October, Walsh will be part of another exhibition in the American Historical Association in New York, called Dubh – A Dialogue with Black, a mix of US and Irish designers that he hopes to bring to Ireland. At the end of the year, a solo exhibition of nine major pieces of his work will be shown at the Oliver Sears Gallery in Dublin.

In the meantime, he is currently working on his Equinox wall for Swarovski, an ambitious conceptual work in light and crystal exploring light’s relationship to time with changing optical effects reflecting the seasonal transitions of light patterns.

“I want it to be a piece that will be tranquil yet alive and based around new technology but not depending on it – a lot of gadgetry can be so overpowering it mutes the senses. I want the light to have a moiré effect on the glass and the piece to have a resolved quietness. I would like to think that it will be around for a while . . . ”

His latest plans include dividing his work bet-ween his design studio and a separate independent workshop where his work is realised. And although his studio pieces are hugely expensive he is hoping to collaborate with a manufacturer for a mass-produced design, but on his own terms. “I also want to have a bad year creatively – either I scale down or try to get big to be small. We have great vibrancy, lots of experience to undertake new challenges. So I want to be the best and to collaborate with others and to create unique 3D objects that bring pleasure to people’s lives.”

josephwalshstudio.com