The unique artwork, the ‘Carlow chair’, was created in 2005 by renowned artist Sasha Sykes. She named it after her home county. 

The artist collected the mosses, lichen, grasses and twigs at the foot of the Wicklow mountains. These are embedded into the chair's gently curved back. 

This chair is an entirely new chair, but everything has roots somewhere.  I was inspired by the Sligo chair and didn't intend to replicate it but to produce something that was a development from it.

The chair is made in a very different way to the Sligo chair, especially the peg through the back.  Woods can be punched and pinned but acrylics rely on cementing (gluing) techniques. Working with clear acrylics makes the process quite complicated as all the joins can be seen.

The curved back was the most difficult aspect of the chair to create. Its base is an annealed and heat-formed sheet of acrylic onto which layers of resin were added. The mould was tipped on each pour, creating the curved resin casting – a very antiquated method!

The strongest chemical bonds come from like-to-like materials. So, we put a block of acrylic into the resin casting at the point where the acrylic seat joins the back."

- Sasha Sykes, artist and designer