Matt Johnson is an image maker, researcher and senior lecturer working in the Graphic Design and Illustration department at LJMU. Matt’s interests include hybrid images, signification, relations between affects and textuality and material in art and design and in the dynamic interface between disciplinary boundaries.
Primarily working from within what became known as Visual Cultures, Matt has cultivated a critical interest in the further development of this field beyond any narrow curatorial approach. Matt’s theoretical and practical work pivots around the idea that the everyday provides the material for multiple subjective statements, narrative positions and contact points, made manifest through the performative subversion of popular culture.
Teaching at LJMU includes the leading the MA Illustration programme, teaching Illustration on the BA (Hons) Graphic Design and Illustration programme, including dissertation and PhD supervision in collaboration with Transart in New York. Matt has taught at a number of UK and European Universities and schools of art, including Bournemouth, LCC and St. Martin’s in London, Manchester School of Art, Hertfordshire, at UCCA in Kent and in Lahti in Finland. Matt has given talks and papers at Universities in Amsterdam, Dublin, Lodz, Berlin and Valencia.
Keen to emphasise the developmental and reflective capacity for practice led learning within a pedagogic context in a way that challenges habit and orthodoxy within a dynamic social environment, this year Matt has been working on the interrelationship between text and image, the determinism and properties of materials and media in relation to art and design practice, adaptation as a simultaneously liberating and constraining creative process, and the opportunities and limitations of precarious working and the professional life of a designer and/ or illustrator in a post-Covid, post-Brexit UK. Matt has a history of freelance workers professional practice and legal rights advocacy through the Association of Illustrators (AOI) and the Creators’ Rights Alliance (CRA).
Currently on indefinite hiatus from a practice based PhD in the department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College in London under the supervision of Dr. Derval Tubridy and Dr. Simon O'Sullivan, Matt has continued to develop interests in research and practice alongside the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari and marginal literature, cinema and animation and sequential art, with a recent turn towards Marxist theories of materialism and the relationship with production and reception. Recently Matt has collaborated with author and philosopher Andrew Culp at Cal Arts MA Aesthetics and Politics to produce graphic arts works as a companion piece to his forthcoming book A Guerilla Guide to Refusal and is contributing to each of the 4 issues of the Left Cultures project.
See Instagram for work in progress and other bits and pieces, web for more finished projects;
https://mutanten.co.uk/
https://www.instagram.com/mattjohnson_vcult/
Degrees
2001, Central St. Martins College of Art and Design, England, MA
1994, Leeds Metropolitan University, United Kingdom, BA (Hons)
Goldsmiths University of London, United Kingdom, MPhil / PhD (currently on hiatus)
Certifications
2017, Liverpool John Moores University, United Kingdom, Emergency First Aid
2013, Goldsmiths University of London, United Kingdom, ReSkin
Academic appointments
External Examiner and EE mentor, School of Art and Design, University of Derby, 2016 - 2021
Senior Lecturer, Graphic Design, Liverpool John Moores University, 2013 - present
Senior Lecturer, Arts University Bournemouth, 2007 - 2012
Postgraduate training
PGCE, United Kingdom, Institute of Education, 2004 - 2005
