Joseph Walsh’s ‘Making In’ design symposium brings global talents to southern Ireland

Over dinner on the eve of Making In, the annual design symposium, on a rambling produce farm near Cork, Ireland, host Joseph Walsh was describing the site’s new Hedge Theatre, a sunken amphitheatre that would be inaugurated the following afternoon with a rousing spectacle of kabuki. When the question of stage lighting came up, Walsh mentioned the floodlights. But many of his fellow diners – including the Pritzker-winning architect Shigeru Ban – were Japanese, and they insisted the stage be surrounded, per tradition, by firelight. Ban scribbled a design on the back of a menu and twisted the paper into a cone, like a torch. The following afternoon, six torches appeared around the stage, built that morning to his specifications.

Behind the scenes of Making In 2024

This anecdote encapsulates perfectly what Walsh, a self-taught designer whose wood and resin furnishings mimic wind-swept trees, has been championing in the seven years since founding this festival: making, pure and simple. The two day lecture programme has grown in size and scope, bursting forth from the reconditioned farm buildings that now serve as Walsh’s studio. The charismatic American curator Glenn Adamson moderates; speakers are recognisable, not only in industry circles. Walsh has had to cap visitor numbers at 400, lest the whole production lose its essence (and southern Ireland run out of rooms). Still, he describes it as ‘just a platform in a workshop’.

‘It would be silly to have an event about making, and somebody like Shigeru tells you, “We can do this easily,” and not let it lead to a moment of producing,’ Walsh says the following morning. ‘I’m always conscious of all the things that can take you away from making.’

Accordingly, the Making In 2024 line-up featured designers from across the spectrum, whose common trait was an unwillingness to hear the word ‘no’. ‘At the start of every project is always, “It’s impossible,”’ said Iris van Herpen, the couturier whose biggest inspiration is the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and who fashions skin, scales and otherworldly skeletons from tulle and extruded plastic. ‘My main focus is to make the invisible visible.’

The Argentine-Italian engineer Horatio Pagani spoke of leaving a top job at Lamborghini – Lamborghini! – when he was denied an autoclave machine, which could have produced the lightweight, flexible carbon-fibre composite he formulated. Today he charges upwards of €3 million for his Pagani hypercars.

Ban (this week awarded the 2024 Praemium Imperiale Architecture Award) spoke of turning literal rubbish – the empty fax-paper tubes lying around his studio – into such a robust material, patrons pay millions to see them sculpted into grand museums. When he uses them to build disaster shelters, the refugees housed there never want to leave.

Speakers lectured with incredible candour and depth. The actor Jeremy Irons popped in with his wife Sinead Cusack for a witty Q&A. And if a member of the audience wanted to know more, there was mingling between sessions in the emerald fields of the Walsh family’s acreage. With his international reach and penchant for entertaining, Walsh has become a master convener.

As in previous years, the 2024 event had a theme: the circle. Organisers inserted it into conversation like a Met Gala concept that speakers sometimes struggled to reference (yes, the cross-sections of the striated, mineral-rich vessels of prize-winning potter Jennifer Lee are circular). Even so, a bigger picture did emerge: of a round table, of people sharing ideas, nurturing connections and coming back. Adamson likened the symposium to a Venn diagram overlapping spheres of craft, art and design.

Later, the feeling of connection was reinforced as an audience dressed in Italian silk and Irish tweed encircled the legendary Japanese kabuki actor Shikan Nakamura VIII, as he performed his ancient art in an amphitheatre constructed with Roman methods.

It reminded Walsh of a thank-you note he received after last year’s show. ‘It said, “We are not in a straight line. But by realising our differences around a round table, we see that we can all add something.” Learning from the past and adding something new to keep it relevant is a positive function of making. It’s not about radical change, but adding something.'

Making In /24 Circle took place 6-7 September 2024, makingin.org