Description
Joseph Walsh was hooked on woodworking at eight years old, when his grandfather introduced him to the fretsaw and let him experiment with other tools. The Irish cabinetmaker built his first dresser when he was twelve; although his mother and aunt urged him to seek formal training, Walsh chose to follow his own creative path. He traveled the world researching cabinetmaking techniques in England, the United States, France, Finland, Germany, Japan, and Argentina. He opened his own studio outside Cork in 1999 and quickly became established in Ireland. Taking care to use wood that is responsibly harvested from local sources, Walsh uses as much of the tree as possible.
Enignum Motion was commissioned by the Mint Museum of Craft + Design to celebrate the opening of the new Mint Museum Uptown at the Levine Center for the Arts in October 2010. It is part of a series of commissions called Project Ten Ten Ten. The console is the first functional piece created from his Movement series. Made of bleached and white oiled ash, with green lacquer details,Enignum uses light and shadow, positive and negative space, to give the appearance of movement, and also includes an actual moving element: a row of articulated wood slats on its top can be raised and lowered as one unit.
The Mint Museum was the first museum in the world to commission a work from Joseph Walsh, and the first American museum to collect his work. Today he is internationally recognized; his creations have been exhibited and published throughout the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States, and reside in houses from England to Uruguay.