Estudio Manus: Sao Paulo

Posted on July 9, 2007 Under Design

The Sao Paulo atelier of Estudio Manus is a place of inspiration for all those who enter into the space, and its no wonder: proprietors/artists Caio de Medeiros and Daniela Scorza take ideas from Brazilian folklore and the insights and novelties they come across when traveling to places such as Vietnam and Chile’s Atacama Desert and pass them on to those who are open to understanding any level between aesthetic and metaphoric. I sought out the gracious couple to specifically find out more about their porcelain line, which includes hollow, egg-shaped containers with long handles at the tops which signify growth, cups and salt-and-pepper shakers with wings as handles — in a Portuguese visual play on words — and other pieces they reformat from leftovers at the porcelain factory. Other inventive pieces they showed me are mirrors backed by text from foreign-language books mounted on wooden sticks, an interpretation that points out that there’s a strange and interesting story behind every face, and their dolls, which are created from unconventional sources, like badminton birdies and antique wooden bowling pins.

France-based Oboe Concept represents them in Europe, but they’re readily equipped to take orders by e-mail directly; see the website for the catalog and contact info.