Richard Tipping

Richard Kelly Tipping (born 1949) is an Australian poet and artist best known for his visual poetry, word art, and large-scale public artworks.

Examples of his work are held in major collections in Australia and abroad.

Tipping was born into a medical family in Adelaide, South Australia, in 1949.

He began composing typographic concrete poetry on a manual typewriter in 1967, exploring the arrangement of letters on the page as a field of poetic composition.

Literary concern is integral to his practice in word art and visual poetry.

In the 1970s Tipping began collecting ironies and oddities in public signage through photography, and changing public signs to make poetic messages.

He studied film, philosophy and literature at Flinders University, graduating in 1972.

After graduation in 1972, Tipping spent a year in Sydney, which included exhibiting with Aleks Danko at Watters Gallery.

He then travelled in the United States and lived in San Francisco, meeting with poets including Michael McClure.

He returned to Adelaide in 1975 where he began working with the South Australian Film Corporation until 1978.

In 1975 Tipping co-founded the ongoing Friendly Street Poets, which began open-mic poetry readings in Adelaide, and edited their first anthology, Friendly Street Poetry Reader, in 1977.

More than 50 appearances in group exhibitions since 1975 including:

Film and video

In the 1980s Tipping made documentary films on writers including David Malouf, Randolph Stow, Peter Porter, Roland Robinson and Les Murray.

Books

Print Folios

Catalogues

Solo exhibitions

Group exhibitions

Signs of Australia (1982) collected many of these found sign anomalies.

Signature works from his explorations of public sign language include No Understanding in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia.

Between 1984 and 1986 he lived in Europe and England with his family, while making documentaries about expatriate writers such as Randolph Stow in Sussex, Peter Porter in London, Jack Lindsay in Cambridge, and David Malouf in Tuscany.

He lectured in communication and media arts at the University of Newcastle, NSW between 1989 and 2010.

In 2021 he opened an art gallery WordXimage in Maitland, NSW specialising in text-picture relationships.

Tipping is known for his visual poetry and word art, including artsigns, textual sculpture, subvertising graphics, and large-scale public artworks both permanent and temporary.

His public art projects include the well known Watermark (2000) steel sculpture (popularly known as "Flood" ) on the Brisbane River, which became the high-water mark for a major flood in 2011.

He has had more than 30 solo exhibitions in Australia as well as in New York, London, Munich, Cologne and Berlin.

Examples of his work are held in the collections of many public galleries, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the British Museum.

Tipping is represented in many important art collections, including the print collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; The Art Gallery of New South Wales; National Gallery of Victoria; Art Gallery of South Australia; Queensland Art Gallery, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory; the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; the Brisbane Powerhouse; and many regional art galleries.

Many of the major Australian libraries, as well as international art collections hold his work.

Articles about his art can be found in Art Almanac, Look magazine of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Guide, and Limelight

In 2007 Tipping completed a doctorate at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) titled Word Art Works: visual poetry and textual objects.

As a poet he has published three books of poems with University of Queensland Press, which are available on Poetry Library, and more recent collections such as Tommy Ruff (2014) and Instant History (2017)

His poems are represented in many anthologies, such as the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry and the New Oxford Book of Australian Verse.