09.03.24

Up and Coming

When Their Commercial Work Dried Up During the Pandemic, This London Studio Bought a Laser Cutter and Started Making Furniture From Aluminum Scrap

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. Post-pandemic, 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.
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09.02.25

Editors' Letter

Introducing the All-New Sight Unseen, Launching This Week

When we first started Sight Unseen back in 2009, we’d spent nearly a decade working in traditional print journalism. Despite launching shortly after the rise of blog culture, we insisted that Sight Unseen be called an online magazine, doubling down on our commitment to long-form feature stories and our hallowed idea of what respectable journalism ought to be. But at the same time, right from the beginning, we thought of our site as a forum for indulging our own interests and obsessions, publishing things that were only tangentially related to the news of the day. As the years went by and our status as design authorities grew, we shifted away from interviewing our inner circle about their weird collections or the books they drew inspiration from and took a more expansive approach, covering of-the-moment exhibitions, interiors, and talents. And yet Sight Unseen still always felt curated — fundamentally a reflection of our personal point of view. It’s what people love so much about the site. As we approach our 17th year in business, that curated sensibility is what we want to double down on.
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07.11.25

Sight Unseen Presents

Goodbye for Now… We’ll Be Back in the Fall!

When you work for yourself, as we have for the past 16 years, it can be hard to turn off your work brain entirely. When we travel, we're constantly noticing architectural details and furniture vignettes that could be content; when a furniture order comes in late at night, it's imperative to address in a timely fashion. However, what we *are* able to do, considering our lack of a corporate overlord, is to suddenly say: "Hey, should we take the summer off?" We eased into this glam-leaning European way of doing things back in 2021, when we were writing How to Live With Objects, and we've deployed it to varying degrees ever since when the temperature start to rise. This summer marks our longest hiatus yet. We'll be back online after Labor Day. Now, we will be working behind the scenes to some extent — tinkering with our editorial vision, working on personal projects, Instagramming, and, most important, running the Sight Unseen Collection, business as usual. But you won't see any editorial content on the site until we return in September. See you then!
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