Greer Lockyear (she/her)
I am a graphic designer driven by the joy I find in people’s personal histories. Through exploring archives, whether that be rare private collections or deep-diving into Twitter threads, I aim to find interesting nuggets of information that can become the cornerstone of a project. I enjoy working with typography and printmaking, often utilising existing visual languages such as motorway road signs or 17th-century songbooks and playfully reframing them in a new context.
This Scar Will Never Heal
The construction of the M8 motorway—part of Glasgow’s controversial regeneration in the 1960s and 1970s—severed the city in half, demolishing numerous historic buildings and displacing whole communities in the process. ‘This Scar Will Never Heal’, a quote lifted from a demonstration at the opening ceremony of the motorway, aims to foreground the forgotten history of this area and the irreparable impact the M8 has had on the face of Glasgow.
The road sign recontextualises the quote from the demonstration and, once put back into the location of the M8, serves as a reminder of the lasting effects of its construction. The two accompanying books, one consisting of anecdotes and the other of imagery of the motorway before and after it existed, further consider the jarring division the M8 has created. This is emulated through the design of the books and the physical splitting up of information between them.
Project Links
Full Frontal Snogging
‘Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging’ by Louise Rennison has been banned on several occasions in American schools, often challenged by parents due to its sexual content and the main character talking back to her parents. The producers of the 2008 film of the book decided to change the title to ‘Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging’ as they believed ‘Full-Frontal’ was too explicit.
This poster was part of an exhibition run by Graphic Design students in which we designed typographic letterpress posters in response to the theme of censorship.
Poplore (or the Ballads of Eileen and Caroline)
Who owns songs? Those who write them or those who sing along? Folksongs traditionally had a sense of collective ownership. When they started to be distributed through print rather than orally, the ownership of these songs shifted from the community to the individual. ‘Poplore’ explores the songs Come On Eileen and Sweet Caroline which, in terms of their significance in British culture, are arguably the closest we have to modern-day folksongs. Through cementing these new versions in print, given to me line-by-line by the public from memory, I seek to re-establish these collectively owned versions back into the world.
Project Links
Bad Books by Bad Politicians
Politicians are increasingly becoming celebrity-like figures, blurring the line between their professional and public life and doing things that far surpass the remit of their role as public servants. Similarly, as more politicians try their hand at authorship, it has given us an insight we really didn’t want into their psyche.
I have collated extracts, interviews and reviews of these terrible books written by not-so-great politicians so that you never have to read them yourself.
