As Jamps Studio, a London-based design and fabrication consultancy, Martha McGuinn and Tom Pearson collaborate with artists like Marguerite Humeau and Yinka Ilori and help create the design environments for exhibitions at the Venice Architecture Biennale and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Friends for a decade, McGuinn and Pearson studied together at the Royal College of Art, teaming up on a few small projects while Pearson was employed in fabrication and McGuinn worked as a high-end cabinet maker. Six years ago, they made their own practice official with Jamps Studio. “We’ve worked on some really great projects with interesting people and have built an amazing workshop to play around in,” says McGuinn.

That sense of play, inventiveness, and fun has now led to By Jamps, objects and furniture McGuinn and Pearson make out of leftovers — mostly aluminum — from fabrication projects they’ve done. If it’s an exercise in letting nothing go to waste, By Jamps also springs from a love of a particular material: the versatility and mutability of aluminum, how it can almost be treated as fabric, woven into a chain-link seat supported by bone-shaped legs cast from a pool noodle (!) or slung on a steel frame. But it can also go more fluid and molten, as it does in their Insect series, which includes a lounger and sconce. Their work was on view at New York’s Lyle gallery earlier this summer and is currently available through The Must and The Sunday Painter. McGuinn filled us in, via email, on where they’ve been and where they’re going.

How did By Jamps evolve? Were you doing this for yourselves and then decided to produce these pieces for a market? 

We have always produced objects and sculptures for ourselves alongside the commercial work that we do as Jamps. Studio practice is really important to both of us; we use it as a way to play around, to think about things, pursue interests and express ourselves. Having a space and a means to make our own work is sort of the fruit of our labors on other jobs. It is only recently that we have formalized our work into By Jamps.

During Covid, we had to continue to work, but most of our commercial jobs were cancelled as they were all public art installations. So we bought a metal laser cutter and set up a new business. We have always used scrap materials from our fabrication jobs in our own work, but the laser cutter was producing a lot of scrap aluminum and when we realized we had both of these resources — the laser cutter and a huge pile of scrap — it was a sort of lightbulb moment.

The work we produce as By Jamps has always really been for ourselves – making furniture for our homes, presents for friends, or as ways of exploring new techniques we might have discovered or invented. The intention has never been to produce things for market, but it’s also nice to make nice things that other people value and connect with.

Are you interested in working with other recycled materials aside from aluminum? Is there something about aluminum that especially appeals to you? 

Aluminum is an amazing material — almost not really metal. You can do so much with it. It’s almost infinitely recyclable. I have been pretty obsessed with how light and manipulable aluminum is and how I might make a textile like structure with it. Weaving is important to me as it has a sort of feminine identity and, as a woman in a very male industry, I feel that weaving in metal allows me to celebrate femininity while also pushing the possibilities of what aluminum can do.

Our commercial practice spans materials and we do enjoy thinking about using stone or timber or glass, but currently, what we have available to us is aluminum and there is so much to do with it that we’re sort of hooked on that. We both have ambitions to work with glass, but our workshop isn’t currently set up for this and it’s really important to us both that we make everything ourselves. We have had some neons lying around the workshop for a couple of years from an old job that Tom is currently working into some new lighting pieces.

What’s your process like with these pieces? Is it more experimental or do you have an idea from the outset of where you’re going with them?

We both work very differently. Tom is a “drawer.” He likes to plan out what he’s making and make that into a reality. Tom’s BA was in illustration and he’s a very skilled illustrator, especially in comics. I think you can see this in his style which is playful and otherworldly. Our degree at the RCA was in speculative design which is a method of designing for other, future or possible realities. This has been a huge influence on both of us. My BA was in art history. I really enjoy researching, thinking, looking at things and then producing work with all of that in my head. I think we both really influence each other’s work. We have similar aesthetic tastes. We often turn up to things wearing very similar outfits (not planned) and get excited by lots of the same artists. We also have a very supportive and encouraging outlook for each other, sharing techniques and pushing each other to go a bit further.

I think the guiding principle for us both is not traditional design of solving problems or making the most ergonomic chair, but playing around, getting excited by what we’re doing and just having a nice time making things that we think are cool and that allow us to think about things.

How do the two of you tend to work together? Is it collaborative at every step? Does one of you take the lead at certain points in the process?

We work together, but not directly in designing the same piece. We help each other, share ideas and hype each other up about some new process or idea. Our styles of working are different to each other and I think this is something to be embraced, which means that our studio is producing a spectrum of work that satisfies us both and offers lots of ideas out to the world.

What’s been inspiring you lately, with respect to your work?

I am really into medieval (specifically 14th Century) illustration and carvings at the moment. I’m spending a lot of time thinking about the past and what it might have been like to live there. The illustration is so symbolic and embedded with intimate understanding of the natural world which I think is missing in my life and it’s amazing to access it through incredible drawing. Obviously, chainmail and scale armor are also huge influences.

Tom has been really inspired by a poem by Karen Bakker called “The Parable of Tree and Stone.” It neatly describes his overlapping interests of technology and nature. It was the trigger for a lot of the drawings that became the Insect series.

A constant inspiration for us both is expanding our practice through experimentation and developing new techniques. We both have fairly short attention spans and we get excited by something, do it, and then move on to the next thing that’s exciting. Sticking to aluminum is good for us practically as we have an almost unlimited supply and because there are so many possibilities with it, but also because it keeps us focused as much as possible!

What’s next for you and By Jamps?

We are very lucky that our work as By Jamps has been well received and this has started to impact our commercial practice as Jamps Studio. Our ability to both design interesting objects and interiors and also deliver big commercial projects has meant that we are being asked to combine the two. We have been asked to design a new music venue in London and produce furniture and a new office for a big London-based gallery. This is something that we hope to continue working towards as a studio – we’re always open to commissions!

Our latest development is in color and we’re super excited about it. I think that’s going to be the next big thing to come through in our practice. We have work on show in London and New York in the next month. We’ll be at Collectible in New York with Lyle Gallery, Frieze in London with The Sunday Painter and South London Gallery as part of a group show [Dwellings, a pop-up show from Computer Room design collective and birdwatching group Flock Together] about bird nests.