Pushing the boundaries of what wood can do with both the tactile expertise of a master craftsman and the visual prowess of a fine artist, Joseph Walsh is a force to be reckoned with on the global furniture design scene - and he’s only in his thirties.

Working primarily with ash, a timber indigenous to his home county, the young designer sculpts open-grained cuts of raw wood into ethereal yet functional segments of tables, chairs and beds that beggar belief.

Pieces like the Erosion V Dining Table and Enignum XIII Shelf give the observer an unmistakable sense of otherworldliness - the remarkable feeling that these items of furniture were not crafted in a working studio in Riverstick, Kinsale but were instead transported from some foreign world where the laws of physics as we know them don’t necessarily apply.

It’s precisely this ‘enchanted forest meets sci-fi chic’ aesthetic that has helped to elevate Walsh’s pieces from their functional forms to works of pure art; you could just as easily spend hours marvelling over the Enignum Pair - a settee and chair combo that wouldn’t seem out of place in Tolkien’s Rivendell - as you could relax on it with a nice cuppa.

Walsh’s work routinely bowls over art and design educators and critics and gallery owners alike. In 2015, the self-taught designer was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by University College Cork in recognition of his contribution to design. His work can be found in renowned museums and private collections around the globe, and his creations are exhibited frequently at art and design fairs at home and abroad.

His latest work will be on show at PAD London 2017 this October, represented by London's cutting-edge Sarah Myerscough Gallery. With it, Walsh seems to follow his creative impulses even deeper into the realms of design possibility, shaping layer upon layer of his beloved ash into objects so evolved they seem to take on lives of their own.