Branching out: the woodworkers breathing new life into an old craft

There is a touch of alchemy to taking the detritus of a dead plant and honouring it by whittling it into something new and beautiful that can serve us, as the tree itself once served the planet and its biosphere.

Wood workers take a product of the earth embodying the soil, wind and rain and then chisel, carve and sand it to reveal the hidden facets that have not seen the light of day for decades – creating something useful and unique. Quiet by nature, they are attuned to a life of communicating with wood fibres, intuiting how they wish to be shaped.

Seanie Barron, a seanchaí, has spent a lifetime searching out bewitching branches in the fields around Askeaton, Co Limerick, and carving them into zoomorphic walking sticks. This shy, enigmatic man may not have the international qualifications of other elite craftspeople, but his sticks with their embedded coins, bullets and animal bones are no less alluring. In the catalogue of a recent exhibition of his work Walking Sticks, Fishing Priests & Smoking Pipes, he admits he never got much schooling.

"Now it wasn't that I was backward, only that I wanted to be out, so they decided to put me up to the farm – a farm labourer. It was there I learned everything about timber. I used to go down to the wood and bring cattle out, and I'd see a stick and I'd be marking it for the next day, the way no one would see it only myself."
His sticks are now being bought by major art collections. Costing between €50 and€100, the ideal thing is to go to Askeaton so that you can savour his insights and stories, as he selects or makes a stick specifically for you. askeatonarts.com

This is What We Do is a Liberties-based carpentry studio making furniture from found, scrap and salvaged materials. They manage to reincarnate jettisoned planks and wind-felled trees into new forms which radiate a weather-beaten, timeworn look. You've likely encountered their work at The Fumbally, Twisted Pepper, The Dylan Hotel, The Bernard Shaw, Dillisk pop-up restaurant in Connemara or the wonderful BallymaloeLitFestival.

“We’re into wood,” says Barry Rogerson, “recycled, salvaged, dumpster-robbed, skip-searched, a wind-felled tree or two, and maybe, if we really have to, something new from the timber yard.” They use these materials as creative inspiration which they then blend to suit the requirements of their clients. The use of old wood lends the reassuring umami quality of good miso, or one’s favourite worn-in jeans in which the denim has turned to flannel softness. thisiswhatwedo.ie

Tony Farrell was one of the 7,000 registered Irish wood-turners making the same bowls, lamps and hollow forms as everyone else until in 2012 he got into making wooden buttons from bits of ash, oak, yew and holly. Wooden buttons can revert even the most mature of us to toddlerhood – that urge to stick them in our mouth and suck on them – or is that just me?

Jonathan Legge of Makers and Brothers may share my fetish as, captivated by their allure, he imagined widening them to the width of dinner plates. Not easy to achieve: turning a bowl is relatively straightforward, but a plate will warp and crack.

Farrell worked for months on the process of felling, planking, drying and seasoning the wood to ensure the plates would be stable. The Irish have been eating off wooden plates for millennia, and while I have only been using them for six months, I am already smitten.
Plates: makersandbrothers.com Buttons: tonyfarrell.ie

Yaffe Mays is the partnership of Rebecca Yaffe and Laura Mays who recently moved their furniture-making workshop from Connemara to an old logging town in northern California. Both were instilled with an almost sacred devotion to the moral integrity of carpentry in California's famous College of the Redwoods. Their work, which features in museums, embassies and private collections, has the resolved austerity of a Zen practise.

Mays talks about the art of planing, sanding and finding the clarity in a wooden surface as though it were a path towards enlightenment.

“You listen to the sound of the plane moving over the surface and become alert to changes within it, noting when you get that sweet ‘swish’ and the surface that results. You become aware of the direction of the grain, the smell of the shavings. Your whole body and senses come into play.”

Deep reflection and analysis infuse their work. “The complexity and beauty of chairs are often overlooked,” says Mays, explaining the intricate grammatical parsing of the making of a chair on her website. “They are the furniture type most engaged with the human body – also the most sculptural, involving a play of positive and negative space, curves and compound angles.”

The couple's move to America has meant abandoning sensuous, damp Irish timber in favour of underutilised hardwoods from redwood country. yaffemays.com

Knife-making is a taut balance between woodwork and metalsmithing. The blade is the main focus, but without a perfectly formed and weighted handle it is destined to sit on the shelf ignored. The handle is the ying to the blade's yang. Most knife-makers will specialise in one part or the other, but Fingal Ferguson is not your typical knife-maker. In fact, he's really a farmer and butcher - the fifth generation to farm the Ferguson land in Gubbeen, West Cork, made famous by his mother's pioneering Gubbeen Cheese. Fingal himself has contributed to the development of Irish cuisine through his Gubbeen Chorizo, currently ubiquitous on Irish menus.

Knives are really only a hobby, an escape from the farm, but have as eager a following as do the cheeses and smoked meats – with a waiting list for each knife. He was trained by the great Bantry-based cutler Rory Connor, who is still a source of continuing inspiration as he continues to hone his craft, forever on the lookout for that perfect piece of bog oak, spalted ash or box-elder burl to fashion into a sensuous, sheen-rich handle that will lure a chef to reach for it every time. fingalfergusonknives.com

The epidemic of garishly-coloured plastic kayaks clinging leech-like to the roofs of cars has spread nationwide. Rory O'Reilly, an architectural technician from Mullingar looking for new opportunities after the collapse of the construction industry, was saddened by their alien artificiality. "Each boat is cast from the same mould, each identical to the next. A true wooden kayak is a unique piece of craftsmanship, ideally made from Western Red Cedar." Cedar's strength-to-weight ratio is unsurpassed, resulting in strong but light kayaks. An added benefit is the relaxing properties of cedar, which allow it to be used in saunas.

“All our boats start off as lengths of solid lumber,” he explains. “Using simple tools we split the lumber into thin strips which we use to form the structure of the vessel. It is at this stage that the true creativity of the craftsman is exposed.”

His timber kayaks cost from €1,800 in comparison to €700 for an equivalent plastic model, but each is an artwork, with the essence of its tree heritage and the craftsman who carved it radiating from its varnished surface. Paddling one along the shore of a lake or river makes nature seems that little bit closer. wildgeesekayaks.com

Liliana Cazacwas raised in Transylvania (Romania) amidst the timber aromas and array of hand tools and chisels in her grandfather's studio. He was a cartwright and wheelwright and her father made cabinets. Her own work exudes the innate ancestral ease of a craft learnt at her grandfather's knee. She makes coats of arms, religious artefacts and furniture which have a medieval quality, the intricate artistry of old cathedrals, of a time before machines. Finding commissions for such work can be a struggle, but the urge to share her skills keeps her going. "I have been carving forever. I just want to keep it alive, to share the beauty with others." lilianacreations.com

Helen Conneely is a sculptor who uses bog oak to create work on all scales, from vast 10m oak pieces to baby-sized baptismal fonts from bog yew, and tiny wearable pieces which our government has presented to the likes of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Xi Jinping.

“When I first saw the bog it was like a graveyard of trees – useless, distressed, and sad,” says Conneely about her time working as a civil engineer with Bord na Móna in the 1980s. “But, as I began to understand that 5,000 years ago all of Ireland was covered in trees I felt that I was connecting with something beautiful – something ancient and sacred.

“Bog wood is a difficult material, like stone, very dense to carve. I peel off the dead bark to reveal the flow of the magnificent roots. It’s not a design process as such, but a slow evolution of shape emerging over time – you have to find the form within something that exists already. The wood has been my journey. That’s where I am – in the roots.”

Conneely was trained by the great bogwood carver Michael Casey, who is still carving away in his 80s in Barley Harbour, on the shores of Lough Ree. celticroots.ie

Edward O'Clery, a structural engineer, runs Saturday Workshop from a shed in his garden in Sandymount, with his daughter Iseult who helps with design at the weekend. Their workshop mostly consists of a computer-controlled router called a CNC machine that can cut out any shape drawn on a CAD file. The dextrous accuracy of this high-tech robot lends their work a simple, toy-like feel, further heightened by O'Clery's tenderly-executed hand-finishing. It's a great example of how cutting-edge technology can lead us straight back to the simplicity of traditional vernacular carpentry/craft. saturdayworkshop.ie