Illustration fair Pick Me Up puts a greater emphasis on process this year, with designers and illustrators demonstrating how they work and allowing visitors to get involved with hands-on workshops.
Pick Me Up, the illustration fair that takes over Somerset House’s Embankment galleries once a year, has become a key date in the design calendar and in many ways works as a litmus test for the trends, concerns and health of the illustration industry more widely. This year there’s a greater focus on process, with even more of the collectives and studios involved in the show offering visitors hands-on experiences rather than passive spectatorship.
This idea can even be seen in the Pick Me Up Selects, the group of artists carefully chosen by the show’s curators and a panel of industry experts as key names that will break through in the coming months. You only have to look at past alumni – Jean Jullien, Anna Lomax, Hattie Stewart, Ping Zhu, Malika Favre – to know that they’re on to something. The idea of process manifests itself both in the sort of work that’s been chosen and the way the show’s curators have chosen to present it. Luke Evans, for example, makes monochrome mandala-like images, produced as part of his BA project Xero, which saw him disassemble a laser jet printer and manually copy the process to show the physicality of static electricity. The concept and how he achieves these almost cosmic forms using a van de Graaff and 500,000 volts is a key part of the power of the finished work. Similarly Rop van Mierlo’s watercolour animals only vaguely allude to the creatures they represent as van Mierlo’s process forces colours to bleed excessively into each other. The images are pleasing in their own right but, like Evan’s work, the illustrations are inseparable from the way they have been made.
For the first time this year, Pick Me Up’s curators have also decided to exhibit sketches, tools and mock-ups, for a deeper understanding of how its Pick Me Up Selects artists work. Paper artist Hattie Newman’s exhibition also features a vitrine holding a partly constructed desert island, the blue of the cutting mat becoming a makeshift sea. Elsewhere there’s a wooden frame which Laura Jouan’s uses to slot in and layer up different transparencies to create her image tropical images. Jack Cunningham’s experiments with 3D printing (in the form of ridiculously cute dinosaurs) also shows how illustrators are moving far beyond the page.
The studios that have taken over spaces in the upper part of the gallery have also had process in mind, putting on an unprecedented number of workshops and activities. Sope studio has brought in a chunky Korrex printing machine to help visitors create their own prints. The concept is simple, choose a design from the likes of Anna Lomax, Kyle Platts and Malika Favre, pick a colour of ink, then watch your plate go through the press and create your custom design. Milan-based studio La Tigre has similarly been holding workshops. Participants can create artwork using stamps inspired by La Tigre’s latest series of prints based around iconic piece of furniture and lighting – a nod to the studio’s Italian heritage. Agency Blink Art commissioned a number of its artists to create limited-edition prints inspired by the Eighties craze for scratch art. Visitors to their room can also have a go at creating one of these rainbow artworks themselves. Peckham Print Studio has been running workshops all week, inviting Pick Me Up visitors to learn how to screen print or bring materials, vintage postcards, and photographs for illustrators like Supermundane’s Rob Lowe to print on. They’ve also been organising a series of collaborative sessions where two illustrators must work together to create experimental prints.
Both Moth Collective and Hato have moved their whole studio to the festival, allowing visitors to gain insight into the way they work. As well as selling books and prints, the latter has been running a series of ‘Today I learnt…with Hato’ workshops that have introduced participants to techniques in bookbinding, zine-making, type design and even coding. The team has invited guests to eat lunch with them every day – something integral to their studio culture – and teamed up with chef Jay Morjaria to produce the second in its Cooking With Scorsese events series, which combines culinary workshops with films from the esteemed director. Moth Collective is hosting more of a open studio, as the animation team try to create a film as visitors – who can see their creative process via a series of mirror screens – watch their every move.
Of course, Pick Me Up is not just an exhibition, it’s a commercial venture as well, and this year’s festival sees a widening of the scope of exciting products for sale, way beyond its initial remit of prints, publications and postcards. There’s ceramics by Saskia Pomeroy, homewares and patterned PJs from Pharmacy and a huge amount of clothing, most notably from fashion label Lazy Oaf, whose room feels like walking into one of its surreal lookbooks, and Glasgow-based Risotto Studio’s new pattern-based apparel line. If Pick Me Up presents the state of UK illustration and graphic design, then it’s a community that’s as welcoming, collaborative and enterprising as ever.
Pick Me Up
Somerset House,
London Until 3 May 2015
www.somersethouse.org.uk/visual-arts/pick-me-up-2015