Paul Elliman

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

Paul Elliman

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 and Tate Modern[1] in London, the New Museum and Moma (Ecstatic Alphabets, 2012) in New York,[2] APAP in Anyang, South Korea,[3] and Kunsthalle Basel. In 2009 his project "Sirens Taken for Wonders" was commissioned for the New York biennial Performa09,[4] 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 transcriptions by Olivier Messiaen for the show We Were Exuberant and Still Had Hope, at Marres Centre for Contemporary Art, Maastricht.[5]

Elliman is visiting critic at Yale School of Art,[6] New Haven, and a thesis supervisor at the Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem, Netherlands.