Curves Of Time

Self-taught designer JOSEPH WALSH has built a global practice of sculptural furniture and monumental works that bend wood into fluid, gravity-defying shapes.

- Y-JEAN MUN-DELSALLE

In the rolling countryside of County Cork, Ireland, past hedgerows and winding lanes, an 18th-century farmhouse in Fartha hums with the sound of hammers, chisels, and sanders as hands coax wood into improbable shapes that split and then converge, giving the sensation of movement.

This is Joseph Walsh's studio, founded when he was 20 years old. It began as a young man's desire to make things and has evolved into one of the world's most respected design studios. Amidst sweeping loops, swirls, ripples, and ribbons of oak, ash, and walnut, one senses that he is not simply shaping furniture or sculpture. It is an experience, an invitation to inhabit form as a gesture suspended.

FROM FARM TO FORM

Walsh was born in 1979 on this farm, surrounded by people who made everything they needed: gates welded by neighbours, leather shoes and schoolbags made by the cobbler, and more. These rhythms of life shaped everything that came afterwards: "I grew up on a farm and was lucky to see a world where people still made and fixed things." Before mass industrialisation swept rural life, improvisation was an inherited culture in agricultural Ireland. "Having something made today is a luxury. When we were young, it was a luxury to buy something. It was normal to make it," he says.