PhD Research Student

Peter Maybury

Make Ready: Productive Disruption and Interstitial Sites of Graphic Design Practice

Research Supervisor: Alan Grossman, Anthony Haughey

Peter Maybury lecturers in the Dublin School of Art & Design. His practice-based research is situated at the interstices of disciplines. A multi-disciplinary artist, graphic designer, filmmaker, publisher, writer, editor, curator, musician, and educator, his output spans more than 25 years during which he has collaborated extensively with artists and institutions, editors and curators, on more than 2000 individual artists publications, and over 50 group show publications in Ireland, Belgium, Luxembourg, UK, US, Italy and Canada. Much of this work has been featured in key design publications including Blueprint, Creative Review, and Emigre magazines. His recent film work includes Landfall (2020), and On being there (2022) as part of an ongoing collaborative practice with Tom dePaor. He is the author of Make Ready (Gall Editions, 2015), and Of (Gall Editions, 2011) with dePaor. His music output includes releases for labels such as Emigré Music (US) Sub Rosa (BEL), Fällt (NI); Osaka (IRL); C/F (NI), and Fort Evil Fruit (IRL).

This thesis draws on five completed publicly mediated publications in which my roles encompassed writing, editing, exhibition-making, curation, publication design, publishing, filmmaking, music composition, recording and production. My practice has emerged from an engagement with independent music and is anchored in the reciprocal knowledge bases or ‘operational fields’ of music and graphic design. In this thesis I position the immersed, improvisatory nature of my transdisciplinary artistic practice in relation to the discipline of Graphic Design. Imbricated issues of authorship and collaboration, the relationships between subject and the affordances of media and technological means and their interstitial deployment, problematise the ‘apparatus’ (Brecht, 2019), dismantling the conceits and constructs, and thereby, expanding the practice and operational field of the graphic design discipline.