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. 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.[1]
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.[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]
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.
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]
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.
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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
University of Sydney. More recent collections such as Tommy Ruff (2014)[28] and Instant History (2017)[29]
His poems are represented in many anthologies, such as the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry and the New Oxford Book of Australian Verse.[4]
As editor
The Word as Art special issue of Artlink (Vol 27 No.1, 2007),[30]
The Friendly Street Poetry Reader, 1st issue (Adelaide University Press, 1977)[31]
Mok: A Magazine of Contemporary Dissolution and Intemperance (5 issues 1968–1969, co-editor)[32] – 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".[33]
Avoiding Myth and Message: Australian Artists and the Literary World (Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2009)[44]
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)[45]
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).
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abPolitics 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)