An Irish Designer Blends Materials and Cultures at World Expo

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An Irish Designer Blends Materials and Cultures at World Expo

This article is part of our Design special section about the reverence for handmade objects.

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One of the first things visitors will encounter as they enter the east gate of the World Expo in Osaka, Japan, opening on April 13, is a 20-foot-high balletic, ring-shape sculpture poised outside the Ireland pavilion.

“It’s quite a complex piece in some ways, but I was trying to create one simple gesture that would have this sense of harmony,” said its creator, Joseph Walsh, a 45-year-old Irish designer known for wood furnishings and sculptures with dynamic, serpentine shapes. At a 150-acre farm near Kinsale, on Ireland’s southern coast, he oversees a multinational team of two dozen people at his Joseph Walsh Studio.

“Magnus Rinn,” as the sculpture is titled, is his first work to use bronze and his first designed for the outdoors. It was also the product of several years of research. Mr. Walsh engaged in extensive studies with the engineering firm Arup, as well as materials testing with university labs in Dublin and in Stuttgart, Germany. The challenge, he said, was creating a form with his signature lightness and movement that could withstand the weather and seismic conditions in Osaka.

“Japan was actually the most extreme environment we identified on the planet,” he said, noting the threat of earthquakes.

The result was a hybrid form in which a bronze lower portion serves as an anchor and laminated oak torques with a single twist above it. To make the wood more durable, Mr. Walsh and his team used a high-pressure autoclave chamber, a strategy inspired by a visit to the Italian studio of the automobile designer Horacio Pagani, who has used a similar technology for his carbon fiber hypercars. Increasing the atmospheric pressure 600 percent bonded the wood laminates, making them stronger and more weather resistant and producing a “hyper-performing wood,” Mr. Walsh said.

The bronze components, which were cast at a foundry in Italy, are embellished with details that Mr. Walsh hand molded in wax, working intuitively. “I ended up staying at the foundry for a few weeks, undoing and doing and just getting lost in the process,” he said. “Each imprint is time passing with a different thought, conscious or subconscious, each a slightly different shape.”

To observers, the pattern suggests leaf forms, tree bark and even dragon scales.

Mr. Walsh said the idea of gilding the sculpture arose during a visit to Chatsworth House, the home in Derbyshire, England, of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, who are regular clients.

“The team at Chatsworth were talking about the fact that the gilded oak windows were the originals from 1700 and that they only regild them every 90 years,” Mr. Walsh said. “I decided to put gilding through the advanced aging test. It doesn’t rust, it doesn’t patinate.”

Outside the Irish pavilion, the shimmering sculpture will stand amid rocks and plantings by Hiroyuki Tsujii, a Japanese landscape designer.

The theme of cultural connectivity, which is central to the pavilion, will continue in a show of contemporary Irish and Japanese craft that Mr. Walsh helped organize for the new Irish Embassy and cultural center in Tokyo, scheduled to open a few days after the expo.

It is also a spirit Mr. Walsh sought to capture with the title of “Magnus Rinn.” The word “rinn,” he said, has meanings in both Gaelic and Japanese that relate to place, circularity and the flow of ideas across cultures.

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