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.

09.05.17

Up and Coming

A Debut Collection Influenced By Poetry, Philosophy, and “Total Garbage”

We've always been curious about solo designers who choose to use a studio name, but we got as good a reason as any recently by Brecht Gander, the designer behind a brand-new, Queens-based studio called Birnam Wood, whose first collection we're debuting here today. A philosophy major and the son of two poets, Gander's studio name is a reference to Macbeth. But its lack of specificity also acknowledges the people who work alongside Gander in his shop — as he says, "I write the songs, but it takes a group to play the music."