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Studio Swine is a collaboration between Azusa Murakami and Alexander Groves. Azusa graduated from the Bartlett School of Architecture and Alexander from the Ruskin School of Fine Art Oxford before both gaining an MA in Design Products at the Royal College of Art. Studio Swine explores design through material innovation and creating new sustainable systems whilst placing an equal importance on aesthetics, believing that desire is the greatest agent of change.
Operating in the fields of design, fashion & architecture, Studio Swine has worked with Veuve Clicquot, Swarovski & Droog. Studio Swine has exhibited at the Barbican, V&A, New York & London Fashion Week and Gwangju Biennale curated by Ai Wei Wei. Swine has received international awards including the Gold Prize at BIO23 Biennale of Design Slovenia, Wallpaper* Design Award and recently nominated for Designs of the Year Award 2013 at the Design Museum London.
This year, you can still catch a glimpse of their work at :
19 October – 12 January 2014
Design Center Malmö, Sweden
1st Shanghai Design Exhibition
30 November – 30 March 2014, Shanghai, China
Design Miami
4 – 8 December, Miami, USA
Studio Swine’s ‘São Paulo Collection’ has been designed and made in São Paulo, Brazil.
Inspired by the Brazilian tropical modernism of the 1950’s Swine has transformed waste materials sourced from the city into a luxury design collection. São Paulo is known in scrap metal circles as the ‘Aluminium Capital’, collecting and recycling more cans than anywhere else in the world. The material’s potential has been explored through sand casting with the naturalistic details captured in the cactus coffee table, and the contemporary abstracted palm pattern in the lounge chair.
The bottle bulbs are a lighting pieces made from beverage bottles that have been heated and re-blown into a eclectic collection of organic forms without the conventional recycling process where the glass is broken down into cullet first. This results in a clearer higher quality glass requiring less energy and retaining some mark of the previous industrially manufactured form. The bulbs are fitted with customised brass fittings and LEDs.
‘São Paulo Collection’ was made for Coletivo Amor de Madre Gallery with the kind support of Heineken.
- text and illustration via www.swinestudio.com