Richard Tipping Explained

Birth Date:1949
Birth Place:Adelaide, Australia
Occupation:Poet, artist
Nationality:Australian
Citizenship:Australia
Alma Mater:Flinders University, University of Technology Sydney

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.

Early life and education

Tipping was born into a medical family in Adelaide, South Australia, in 1949. His father Michael Tipping served in the RAAF flying in Beaufighter aircraft in WW2 and became a dermatologist. His mother Barbara Kelly was a social worker specialising in multiple sclerosis and breast cancer. He matriculated from St Peter's College in Adelaide in 1966, and tried a year at law school at the University of Adelaide before studying film, philosophy and literature at Flinders University, graduating in 1972.

After an MA, in 2007 Tipping completed his doctorate at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) with an exegesis titled Word Art Works: visual poetry and textual objects.

Career

Following undergraduate study, Tipping spent a year in Sydney in 1973, which included exhibiting with Aleks Danko at Watters Gallery. He then travelled in 1974 to the United States and lived in San Francisco, meeting with poets including Michael McClure and Robert Duncan, and visiting Mexico and Guatemala. He returned to Adelaide in 1975 and began work with the South Australian Film Corporation as a researcher until 1978.[1] [2]

Tipping's career began with free verse poetry, and soon included composing typographic concrete poetry on a manual typewriter, 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.[3]

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.[4]

His first solo exhibitions were at the Adelaide Festival Centre in 1978, at Robin Gibson Gallery in Sydney in 1980, and at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney] in 1983.

From 1979 he began living with artist Mazie Turner (Mazie Karen Turner) and over the next decades they had three children together: Kai, Jasper and Grace. Their careers were separate but parallel, and Turner achieved recognition with large-scale blueprints on cloth in the 1980s, and later with abstract paintings.

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. The Stow film was shown on ABC Television in Australia, and others released on VHS tape through the Australian Film Institute.

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

Tipping's career has a timespan of over fifty years, working in both spoken and graphic poetry and in visual art in many media and scales.

In 2021 he opened an art gallery WordXimage[5] in Maitland, NSW specialising in text-picture relationships.

Art

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.[6]

Tipping's public sculptures are illustrated and described in his book Hear the Art: visual poetry as sculpture, Puncher and Wattman 2022.[7]

In the late 1970s and early 1980s Tipping collected ironies and oddities in public signage through photography. Signs of Australia published by Penguin Books in 1982 collected many of these found sign anomalies. In 1979 Tipping began changing public signs[8] to make poetic messages. Signature works from his explorations of public sign language include No Understanding in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia.[9] His public art projects include the well known Watermark (2000)[10] steel sculpture (popularly known as "Flood"[11]) on the Brisbane River, which became the high-water mark for a major flood in 2011.[12]

He has had more than 30 solo exhibitions in Australia as well as in New York,[13] [14] London, Munich, Cologne and Berlin.[15]

Collections

Examples of his artwork are held in depth in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales,[16] the British Museum.,[17] the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra;[18] and Heide Museum of Modern Art.[19]

Tipping is represented in other major art collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The 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;[20] the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; and the Brisbane Powerhouse. Many regional Australian art galleries as well as key public and university libraries also hold his work.[21]

Recognition

A PhD thesis by Sabrina Caldwell completed at the Australian National University in 2008, titled The Politics of Imagination: Richard Kelly Tipping and the Art and Technology of Words, Images and Objects, is available to download as a document.[22]

Tipping was awarded various grants by the Australia Council (now known as Creative Australia), starting with a Young Writer's Grant from the Literature Board in 1973. In 1984 he and Mazie Turner co-won a Dyason Bequest from the Art Gallery of New South to help fund a residency in Italy through the Visual Arts Board.

Articles about his art can be found in Art Almanac,[23] Look magazine of the Art Gallery of New South Wales,[24] Art Guide,[25] and Limelight[26]

Poetry

As a poet he published three books of poems with University of Queensland Press. These were available on Poetry Library,[27] but that site is currently off-line thanks to the ineptitude and insouciance of the University of Sydney. More recent poetry collections are Tommy Ruff (2014)[28] and Instant History (2017)[29]

His poems are represented in many anthologies, including the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry edited by Les Murray, the New Oxford Book of Australian Verse edited by Philip Meade and John Tranter, and the Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry edited by John Kinsella.

As editor

Film

In the 1980s Tipping made documentary films on writers including David Malouf, Randolph Stow, Peter Porter, Roland Robinson and Les Murray.[32]

Works

Books

Print Folios

Catalogues

Solo exhibitions

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

Film and video

External links

Notes and References

  1. Politics of Imagination: Richard Kelly Tipping and the Art and Technology of Words, Images and Objects by Sabrina Bleecker Caldwell, Doctoral thesis. (Australian National University, Canberra, 2008)
  2. Word art works : Visual poetry and textual objects. 10453/52683. 2007. Thesis. Tipping. Richard Kelly.
  3. http://artworkscatalogue.griffith.edu.au/web/pages/gal/Display.php?irn=1679&QueryPage=%2Fweb%2Fpages%2Fphm%2FQuery.php Griffith University art collection
  4. Web site: Richard Tipping . Friendly Street Poets . 28 June 2008 . 11 February 2021.
  5. Web site: Home . wordximage.art.
  6. Web site: Richard Tipping: Art Word. 29 March 2018.
  7. Web site: Hear the Art: Visual Poetry as Sculpture .
  8. http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/collection/database/?irn=319000 Powerhouse Museum collection, artist Richard Tipping
  9. Web site: 2003 National Sculpture Prize and Exhibition - Richard Tipping - No Understanding . . 11 February 2021.
  10. http://ro.ecu.edu.au/landscapes/vol3/iss2/3/ Watermark Public artwork
  11. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-01-13/the-flood-sculpture-at-the-brisbane-powerhouse-is/1904076 Watermark flooded ABC News
  12. Web site: Watermark flood sculpture Brisbane by Richard Tipping .
  13. Web site: Richard Tipping: Versions Perversions, Subversions & Verse.
  14. News: Art in Review. The New York Times. 8 January 1999. Johnson. Ken.
  15. Web site: Richard Tipping exhibitions.
  16. Web site: Works by Richard Tipping | Art Gallery of NSW.
  17. Web site: Collections Online | British Museum.
  18. http://www.printsandprintmaking.gov.au/catalogues/artist/10147/richard-tipping.aspx?related=work Prints and Printmaking, National Gallery of Australia, 99 images of works
  19. https://www.heide.com.au
  20. http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/mob/collection/database/?irn=319001&img=171212 Powerhouse Museum
  21. Web site: Richard Tipping collections.
  23. Web site: Richard Tipping: Instant History. 5 April 2017.
  24. Web site: The art that made me: Richard Tipping.
  25. Web site: Richard Tipping: Art Word. 17 July 2018.
  26. Web site: The artist Tipping the gender balance in street signs.
  27. Web site: Australian Poetry Library.
  28. Web site: PressPress Richard Tipping.
  29. https://www.theseflyingislands.com/2021/01/richard-tipping.html?m=0
  30. https://www.artlink.com.au/articles/2910/editorial/ "The Word as Art"
  31. Web site: Generation of'68 – Printed Shadows – 40 Years of Cultural Journalism .
  32. Web site: Writers Talking | Richard Tipping | ACMI collection .
  33. https://flyingislandspocketpoets.com.au
  34. Web site: Richard Tipping "Subvert I Sing".
  35. Web site: Works by Richard Tipping | Art Gallery of NSW .
  36. Web site: Airpoet : Word works / By Richard Tipping; screen printed by Alison White & Richard Tipping - Catalogue | National Library of Australia .
  37. Web site: Instant History | Australian Galleries .
  38. Web site: Richard Tipping: Versions Perversions, Subversions & Verse . Ubu Gallery . 26 May 2021 . 3 February 2023.
  39. Web site: Richard Tipping – Artist Talk & Installation at the AGNSW | Australian Galleries.
  40. http://www.sculpturebythesea.com/Home.aspx Sculpture by the Sea
  41. http://www.bibliotheca.org.au/bibliotheca/publications.cfm Bibliotheca Librorum publisher
  42. https://www.mca.com.au/collection/exhibition/504-avoiding-myth-and-message-australian-artists-and-the-literary-world/ Avoiding Myth and Message
  43. http://nga.gov.au/Exhibition/SculpturePrize03/Detail.cfm?IRN=122535&ViewID=2 National Gallery of Australia

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