About the artist
Stephen Banham is a typographer, writer and educator. He is founder of Letterbox, a typographic studio based in Melbourne/Naarm.
Described as a ‘typographic evangelist’ by the renowned design journal Eye, Banham’s typographic explorations focus on the social and cultural aspects of letterforms. Recent commissions include One Day In Our Park, a 360-metre work comprising of over 1.6 million tiles, for Metro Tunnel.
A board member of the International Society of Typographic Designers, Banham has written 18 books on typography and is Senior Lecturer in Typography at RMIT University’s School of Design. He has also been a typography expert witness in both the Supreme and Federal Courts of Australia.
About the work
Monument to the Overheard by artist Stephen Banham, offers fragments of real conversations overheard at the Prahran Market in 2023. The result is a site-specific solid steel typographic installation, monumentalising these tiny snippets of incidental, everyday discussions.
From phrases of motherly comfort to her daughter (Blink and it might just go away…), a discussion of beauty treatments (my agreed brow colour…), or a comment on the pandemic (foggy families of…), this work focusses on puzzling slices of ‘chit-chat’ - the cultural marginalia that eludes formal historical record.
Monument to the Overheard was commissioned as part of a new parklet development guided by our Open Spaces Strategy and can be seen in the Mount Street Pocket Park (35-37 Mount Street), Prahran.
Details
- Artist: Stephen Banham
- Date completed: 2025
- Medium: Powder-coated steel