Enignum Locus Chatsworth Chair I, final artist proof

This chair is the last of five prototypes Walsh developed in preparation for a commission from the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire to add twenty-four chairs to the dining room of their ancestral home, Chatsworth House, in Derbyshire, England. Just as each invited guest at the dining table is unique, so too is each chair. The wood’s quirks and the artist’s sensitivity to handcrafting the material allow for natural variants in the form of each chair. Only the Duchess sits in a chair with a higher bend in its graceful back, a material signal of her elevated status as hostess of the house and table. Walsh invented the name “Enignum” from the Latin enigma and lignum, or mystery-wood, a word that for him suggests that “the mystery of the composition lies in the material” itself. Of the suite, Walsh says, “I have stripped wood into thin layers, manipulating and reconstructing them into free-form compositions. I then shape through these layers to reveal not only the honesty of the structure but the sculpted form which is a unique collaboration of man and material.”

Entirely self-taught, Walsh began woodcarving at the age of eight and opened his studio in Cork, Ireland, near his childhood home, at nineteen. Over time, Walsh has mastered the art of laminating, joining, bending, carving, and shaping wood to such a degree that he has generated a distinctive and technically sophisticated formal and structural language. His work scales from the precise minutiae of complex cabinetry articulations, to vast sweeping expanses of architectural installations, suggesting the spatial dynamism of the baroque or art nouveau. His work is a contemporary descendent to iconic works in The Met collection, most clearly the steamed bent wood of Thonet, the pioneering German cabinetmaker and manufacturer of the most ubiquitous café chair ever produced. The complexity of his biomorphic allusions recall Gustave Serrurier-Bovy’s 1899 wooden cabinet, as well as the whiplash curves and fluidity of Eugène Galliard’s 1900 walnut side chair created for the Exposition Universelle Internationale.