Tabula Rasa Coffee Table in Raw Black Steel by Mtharu

MTHARU is an art and design studio, a materials research lab, and a manufacturing company based in Calgary, Canada. Since inception in 2013, the studio aims to create unique tools through material research, and deploy them at various scales to create functional works of contemporary art as furniture and lighting. After graduating as a mechanical engineer in 2008, Sumer immediately set out to explore his yearning for design and completed the Master of Architecture program at the University of Calgary. He studied anything he could fit into his schedule including jewellery, textiles, industrial design, casting, metals, and wood. The studio name, MTHARU, comes from designer Sumer Singh's ancestral heritage, meaning sword hilt maker. With a 500 year old lineage of artisans, creativity and making is deeply rooted in Sumer's bloodline. The products created at MTHARU blur the lines between art, architecture and engineering. The materials used are often left in their raw state and only natural products are utilized. With no particular genre to categorize the end result, the designs are strongly based on the idea of true-making by purely using material attributes to achieve the form and function.