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 Streetpoetry 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 (2000) steel sculpture (popularly known as 'Flood') 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 (Vol 27 No.1, 2007), The Friendly Street Poetry Reader (Adelaide University Press, 1977) and Mok (5 issues 1968–1969) – 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, Sydneythe 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.

Books

• Off the Page and Back Again, visual poems and sculptures, (Writers Forum, London, 2010)
• Subvert I Sing, visual poems and graphics, (Red Fox Press, Ireland, 2008)
• Notes towards Employment, poetry, (Picaro Press, Warners Bay NSW, 2006)
• Five O'Clock Shadows, poetry, (Thorny Devil Press, Newcastle, 1989)
• Nearer by Far, poetry, (University of Queensland Press, 1986)
• Headlines to the Heart, poetry with drawings by Maize Turner, (Pothole Press, London, 1985)
• Diverse Voice, visual poetry, (The International Poetry Archive, Oxford, 1985)
• Signs of Australia, photographs, (Penguin Books Australia, 1982)
• Domestic Hardcore, poetry, (University of Queensland Press, 1975)
• Soft Riots, poetry, (University of Queensland Press, 1972)

Print Folios

• Lovepoems, 20 screenprints in a folio, (thorny Devil Press, Newcastle 2007)
• The Sydney Morning 1-IV, 50 prints in four folios, (Thorny Devil Press, Newcastle, 1989–1994)
• Word Works, 10 large screenprints, (Adelaide, 1979)

Catalogues

• Only Emotion Endures (Australian Galleries, Sydney, 2008)
• Multiple Choice (Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery, NSW, 2007)
• Roadsigned, postcard pack, (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2005)
• Public Works (Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide, 2002)
• City Rubbings (Conny Dietzschold Gallery, Sydney and Cologne, 2002)
• Hear the Art (The Eagle Gallery, London, 1997)
• Multiple Pleasures (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1996)
• Word Works 2 (Powell Street Gallery, Melbourne, 1980)
• Word Works (Robin Gibson Gallery, Sydney, 1980)

Solo exhibitions

• Studio (Australian Galleries, Sydney, 2012)
• Hearth (Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 2009)
• Only Emotion Endures (Australian Galleries, Sydney, 2008)
• Subvert I Sing (Multiple Box Sydney, 2008)
• Multiple Choice (Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery, NSW, 2007)
• Fresh Concrete (John Miller Gallery, Newcastle, 2007)
• Imagine Silence (Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide, 2007)
• Errrorism, (Multiple Box Sydney, 2004)
• Art Signs and Word Sculptures (Banning + Low, Washington DC, 2004)
• Exit Strategy (The Studio, Sydney Opera House, 2004)
• Street Talk (Banning Gallery, New York, 2003)
• Public Works (Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide, 2002)
• One Two Many (Multiple Box Sydney, 2001)
• Versions: Perversions, Subversions and Verse (Ubu Gallery, New York, 1998)
• Hear the Art (The Eagle Gallery, London, 1997)
• Multiple Pleasures (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1996)
• Art Allergy with Alex Selenitsch, (Rhumbarellas Gallery, Melbourne, 1994)
• Between the Lines (United Artists Gallery, Melbourne, 1984)
• Fast Art (Garry Anderson Gallery, Sydney, 1983)
• Ideagraphics (Rosyln Oxley Gallery, Sydney, 1983)
• Inside Outside (Ray Hughes Gallery, Brisbane, 1981)
• Word Works 2 (Powell Street Gallery, Melbourne, 1980)
• Word Works (Robin Gibson Gallery, Sydney, 1980)
• The Everlasting Stone (Adelaide Festival Centre Gallery, 1978)
• Soft Riots with Aleks Danko, (Watters Gallery, Sydney, 1973)
• Uck with Aleks Danko, (Llewellyn Gallery, Adelaide, 1970)

Group exhibitions More than 50 appearances in group exhibitions since 1975 including:

• Sculpture by the Sea Bondi, 2016 (also 1998, 1999, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015)
• The Silent Scream (Monash University, 2011)
• Avoiding Myth and Message: Australian Artists and the Literary World (Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2009)
• Mapping Correspondence: Mail Art in the 21st Century (Center for Books Arts, New York, 2008)
• Multiplicity: Print and Multiples (Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2006)
• The National Sculpture Prize and Exhibition (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2003)

Film and video

• Documentary portraits of Australian writers including Roland Robinson, Les Murray, Peter Porter, Randolph Stowe, David Malouf, and Sumner Locke-Elliott (1984–86)
• Documentary portraits of artists who make books including: Bob Cobbing (UK), Ronald King (UK), Warren Lehrer (US), Ed Ruscha (US), Christo and Jeanne-Claude (US), Purgatory Pie Press (US) and other in progress (1994–present).

• Sculpture by the Sea Retrieved 30 September 2014
• Bibliotheca Librorum publisher Retrieved 30 September 2014
• Avoiding Myth and Message Retrieved 30 September 2014
• National Gallery of Australia Retrieved 30 September 2014