Thomas Lamadieu’s Sky Art Project at the Pick Me Up festival.
When: 23rd April – 4th May 2015, open daily 10am – 6pm, late night Wednesdays & Thursdays until 10pm
Where: Embankment Galleries, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA
£: Admission costs £10, concessions £8, and a festival pass £17.50
What is it?
The annual contemporary graphic arts festival, Pick Me Up, returns to Somerset House featuring a fresh line-up of designers and illustrators. After five successful years of showcasing the best new work from all disciplines within the graphic arts spectrum, Pick Me Up 2015 will offer visitors the chance to engage directly with talent, see work being made on site, participate in lively discussions, and even create their own work to take home.
Located at the heart of the festival in 2015 will be Pick Me Up Platform, a diverse programme of drop-in debates, presentations and open-forums that will continue almost non-stop throughout the 12-day run. The Pick Me Up Platform will be a hub of activity, allowing visitors to participate in dynamic discussions as well as hearing anecdotes about particular projects and learning about the creative journeys of inspiring practitioners specialising in techniques ranging from laser-cutting to traditional embossing and printing.
Music continues to play an important part in the festival, with Cover Club presents: In Conversation with Ian Anderson, founder of The Design Republic, at the late night opening on Thursday 30th April. The evening of talks will centre around Anderson’s work designing record sleeves for the seminal label, Warp Records, accompanied by specially curated DJ sets ’til late.
Between 10am and 4pm on Saturday 24th and Sunday 25th April, Pick Me Up favourite Rob Flowers will lead free, drop-in Scratch Art Workshops. To coincide with the workshops, children (and big children, too) are invited to help Flowers craft a unique story out of scratch art.
For those in need of a pick-me-up at the festival, FARM:shop, east London’s urban farming and cooking school, will be serving up some of London’s freshest food, grown and picked at their indoor farm in Dalston. For their first presentation at the festival, they will not only be serving tasty treats but also collaborating with Pick Me Up artists to produce specially designed grow-kits and seed packs to inspire visitors to get farming at home.
As in previous years, each of the individual studio spaces presented by the collectives, galleries and design studios will be interactive, with some special events throughout the festival. For example, newcomers to Pick Me Up, Peckham Print Studio, will share the secrets of a professional screen-printing studio with members of the public by hosting interactive workshops on producing hand-printed editions.
More info: www.somersethouse.org.uk