Richard Tipping


Richard Kelly Tipping was born in Adelaide, Australia, in 1949 and studied film, philosophy and literature at Flinders University. He is a significant poet and artist working between image and language.
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 1975 he co-founded the ongoing Friendly Street poetry readings in Adelaide, and edited their first anthology in 1977. In the 1970s Tipping began collecting ironies and oddities in public signage through photography, and changing public signs to make poetic messages. Signs of Australia published by Penguin Books in 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. His public art projects include the well known Watermark steel sculpture on the Brisbane River which became the high water mark for a major flood in 2011. He continues to explore the physical qualities of language and making art with words, getting poetry off the page and into the streets. As a poet he is represented in many anthologies and has published five books. Richard Tipping is best known as a sculptor and word-artist who has had more than twenty solo exhibitions in Australia as well as in New York, London, Munich, Cologne and Berlin. He is represented by Australian Galleries in Sydney and Melbourne and is an associated artist with Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide. Richard Tipping completed a doctorate in 2007 at the University of Technology Sydney titled Word Art Works: visual poetry and textual objects.
Richard Tipping edited The Word as Art special issue of Artlink,
The Friendly Street Poetry Reader and Mok – the first of a wave of small magazines in late 1960s defining a shift in Australian poetry which became known as 'The Generation of 68'.
Tipping is represented in many important art collections, including the print collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the British Museum, London; The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the State Galleries of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, Tasmania and the Northern Territory; the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; the Powerhouse Centre for the Live Arts, Brisbane; regional art galleries including Lake Macquarie, NSW; Lismore, NSW; Gold Coast, Qld; major libraries including the National Library, Canberra; the Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW; the State Library of Victoria; the State Library of Queensland; and international art collections such as The Kommunication Museum, Frankfurt; the Sackner Archive of Visual Concrete Poetry, Miami; the Beinecker Library, Yale University; the Rare Books Collection, Buffalo University; the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, Los Angeles,
In the 1980s Tipping made documentary films on writers including David Malouf, Randolph Stow, Peter Porter, and Les Murray. For two decades he was a lecturer in communication and media arts at the University of Newcastle, NSW. He currently lives in Sydney.

Works

Books
Print Folios
Catalogues
Solo exhibitions
Group exhibitions
More than 50 appearances in group exhibitions since 1975 including:
Film and video