Paul Elliman (born 1961) is a British artist and designer based in London. His work combines an interest in

typography Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing ( leading), and ...

and the human voice, often referring to forms of audio signage that mediate a relationship between them. His typeface Found Fount (aka Bits) is an ongoing collection of found ‘typography’ drawn from objects and industrial debris in which no letter-form is repeated. Elliman's work has addressed the instrumentalisation of the human voice as a kind of typography, engaging the voice in many of its social and technological guises, as well as imitating other languages and random sounds of the city including the non-verbal messages of emergency vehicle sirens, radio transmissions and the muted acoustics of architectural spaces. He has exhibited in the

Institute of Contemporary Arts The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) is an artistic and cultural centre on The Mall in London, just off Trafalgar Square. Located within Nash House, part of Carlton House Terrace, near the Duke of York Steps and Admiralty Arch, the ICA c ...

and

Tate Modern Tate Modern is an art gallery located in London. It houses the United Kingdom's national collection of international modern and contemporary art, and forms part of the Tate group together with Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. It is ...

in London, the

New Museum The New Museum of Contemporary Art, founded in 1977 by Marcia Tucker, is a museum in New York City at 235 Bowery, on Manhattan's Lower East Side. History The museum originally opened in a space in the Graduate Center of the then-named New Sc ...

and Moma (Ecstatic Alphabets, 2012) in New York, APAP in Anyang, South Korea, and

Kunsthalle Basel Kunsthalle Basel is a contemporary art gallery in Basel, Switzerland. As Switzerland's oldest and still most active institution for contemporary art, Kunsthalle Basel forms a vital part of Basel's cultural centre and is located next to the city's ...

. In 2009 his project "Sirens Taken for Wonders" was commissioned for the New York biennial Performa09, and took the form of a radio discussion about the coded language of emergency vehicle sirens, as well as a series of siren-walks through the city. In 2010 he contributed a series of whistled versions of

bird song Bird vocalization includes both bird calls and bird songs. In non-technical use, bird songs are the bird sounds that are melodious to the human ear. In ornithology and birding, songs (relatively complex vocalizations) are distinguished by func ...

transcriptions by

Olivier Messiaen Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen (, ; ; 10 December 1908 – 27 April 1992) was a French composer, organist, and ornithologist who was one of the major composers of the 20th century. His music is rhythmically complex; harmonically ...

for the show ''We Were Exuberant and Still Had Hope,'' at Marres Centre for Contemporary Art, Maastricht. Elliman is visiting critic at

Yale School of Art The Yale School of Art is the art school of Yale University. Founded in 1869 as the first professional fine arts school in the United States, it grants Masters of Fine Arts degrees to students completing a two-year course in graphic design, painti ...

, New Haven, and a thesis supervisor at the Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem, Netherlands.

References

External links

Now Hear This, Wired archive, June 2003

Werkplaats Typografie online

Ecstatic Alphabets
{{DEFAULTSORT:Elliman, Paul English contemporary artists English male voice actors 1961 births Living people