ELCAF - 2nd EAST LONDON COMICS & ART FESTIVAL

ELCAF announces 2013 programme and exhibitors: Burger nail art, felt monsters, Flying Eyes, a Treasure Fleet from Berlin – and more!

Details: Saturday 22nd June 2013, 10am-7pm, York Hall (5 Old Ford Rd  Bethnal Green, London E2 9PJ), £3 entry for adults (payable online in advance via http://elcaf.eventbrite.co.uk/ or on the door), free entry for under 16s, www.elcaf.co.uk 
London, March 2013 – ELCAF 2013 is shaping up to be an epic adventure: one jam-packed, awesome day out with all sorts of ways to get involved in comics, illustration and graphic art. York Hall in Bethnal Green will be packed with comics and art lovers, food stalls, workshops and experiences to explore.
You’ll need fuel for the journey, so why not stop off at the Streetkitchen burger trailer for an out-of-this-world burger created especially for ELCAF and served from an authentic Airstream trailer. And you’ll want to be outfitted properly for your expedition - so stick with the burger theme and have your digits stylishly tailored at the Burger Nail Bar. While you’re there, you just might meet legendary burger blogger Burgerac, who will be at ELCAF to 'meat' fans. 

Now you're geared up and ready to check out the rest of the festival. Your burger nails will remind you that food and art go together beautifully, so share the love – bring your own recipe or just have your favourite dish in mind and have it illustrated at the Ready Steady Draw stand.

Stop by The Felt Mistress's stand to shriek in horror at her intricate, collectible felt monsters and get tips from Louise Evans, aka the Felt Mistress, on creating a terrifying traveling companion of your own. You don’t have to make a monstrous toy from scratch: if you fancy recycling, visit the Toy Hacking workshop from Exploring Senses for some help combining old toys into mutant hybrids.

You and your monsters can then visit hip New York-based artist and zine publisher Andy Rementer’s new mural just for ELCAF in York Hall’s courtyard. If that gets you in the mood for large-scale drawing, stick around to watch some of the finest comic and illustration artists duke it out at the Secret Walls drawing battle later on.

Other stand-out artists at ELCAF include some of the hottest artists and illustration collectives in London and the UK, including the illustrious Nous Vous and local East London hero Dilraj Mann, whose stylish Dalston sirens have been gracing zines and comics collections as far away as Latvia. International comics groups, like Berlin's Treasure Fleet and Portland’s Reading Frenzy, have journeyed from afar to bring the best international art to London and will be speaking about their local scenes on the main stage.

Intrepid kids will want to scout out the Flying Eye and Phoenix stands, showcasing brilliant children's illustration. Kids and parents can work on comics skills with illustrator and typographer Takayo Akiyama, whose expertise earned her work for Puma by Hussein Chalayan and Alfred Dunhill - then join the people behind kid’s illustration magazine Loop in creating your own mini-newspaper.

If after all this excitement you still want more, there will be animation showcases by Blink Ink, Not to Scale and Studio AKA to feast your eyes on. Check out www.elcaf.co.uk to plan your visit.

Says ELCAF curator, Ligaya Salazar: “We wanted the programme to reflect the wide spectrum of practice that exists in the fields of comics and illustration and give people the opportunity to watch, buy and create drawings of their own.” 

Alex Spiro, Creative Director at Nobrow, says: "We're thrilled to be hosting another ELCAF after last year's phenomenal success and to welcome a swathe of talented creators and publishers from across the UK and increasingly from across the world. We're excited and honoured to be collaborating with Joana Felipe and Ligaya Salazar, who have worked on the V&A Friday Lates for years. The festival is set to be bigger, better and we'll have burgers…. what more could you want?" [ENDS]


Notes to Editors

IMAGE CREDIT

ELCAF 2013 poster by Andy Rementer, courtesy Nobrow Press

ABOUT THE FESTIVAL

ELCAF 2013, the second East London Comic & Arts Festival, is presented by Nobrow Press. Visit www.elcaf.co.uk for more information and a video of last year’s festival. Contact us on Twitter via @ELCAFest and @nobrowpress, using the hashtag #elcaf2013. 

ABOUT NOBROW
Co-founded by Sam Arthur and Alex Spiro in 2008 and now a thriving team, Nobrow Press provides an independent platform for graphic art, Illustration and art comics in the UK and abroad, aiming to be a leading proponent of quality in book design, as well as a standard bearer for original creative content in print publishing. Nobrow cares about books’ inherent qualities as objects, so every book looks good, smells good and most of all, tells a great story. Nobrow France was recently launched to publish French editions of popular books and Nobrow Small Press continues to produce limited edition screen prints by hand in East London, working with the world’s best graphic artists. Flying Eye, Nobrow’s children’s imprint, was launched in January 2013. See www.nobrow.net and http://www.flyingeyebooks.com/ for more information.

ABOUT FESTIVAL TEAM
Festival Curator
Ligaya Salazar is a curator, commissioner and writer specialising in contemporary design, fashion and graphics. She recently curated the V&A contemporary exhibitions Yohji Yamamoto (2011) and Fashion V Sport (2008), for which she also edited the accompanying publications. In 2012, she co-curated an exhibition on emerging Fashion Illustration at the Fashion Space Gallery in London. She devised the V&A Friday Late Programme (2008 –2010), a series of fashion-related Friday Lates in Paris (2012) and numerous Friday Late events, including No Strings in 2011 and Pen-Paper-Scissors in 2009. Her next exhibition, Memory Palace, a coming-together of a new piece of fiction and twenty new commissions of graphic design and illustration, opens in June 2013. 
Festival Creative Producer

Joana Filipe is an exhibition designer, producer and curator. She co-founded Silicone Brothers in 2004, a prop-making studio that supports artists and designers. She has worked on the V&A Friday Late programme since 2010 and curated Friday Late Archive Live in 2011. She curated Speed Collaborating for DesignersBlock in 2012, made the exhibition design of 'Future Fabrics Expo' in 2011 and 2012 and in 2013, designed 'New Formations: A Fashion Dialogue', part of the International Fashion Showcase.





Categories: ,