Richard Tipping

Last updated
RT portrait 2003 b&w square crop 100dpi.jpg

Richard Tipping
Born1949
Adelaide, Australia
OccupationPoet, artist
NationalityAustralian
CitizenshipAustralia
Alma mater Flinders University, University of Technology Sydney
Website
www.richardtipping.com

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.

Contents

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 Adelaide University 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]

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.[ citation needed ]

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 byPenguin 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]

Publications

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

Film

In the 1980s Tipping made documentary films on writers including David Malouf, Randolph Stow, Peter Porter, Roland Robinson and Les Murray. [34]

Works

Books

Print Folios

Catalogues

Solo exhibitions

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

Film and video

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wendy Sharpe</span> Australian artist (born 1960)

Wendy Sharpe is an Australian artist who lives and works in Sydney and Paris. She has held over 70 solo exhibitions nationally and internationally, been awarded many national awards and artist residencies for her work, and was an official Australian War Artist to East Timor in 1999–2000.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joseph Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski</span>

Joseph Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski AM, FRSA was best known for his ground-breaking work in chromasonics, laser kinetics and 'sound and image' productions. He earned recognition in Australia and overseas for his pioneering work in laser sound and image technology. His work included painting, photography, film-making, theatre design, fabric design, murals, kinetic and static sculpture, stained glass, vitreous enamel murals, op-collages, computer graphics, and laser art. Ostoja flourished between 1940 and 1994.

Herbert Flugelman, usually known as Bert, was a prominent Australian visual artist, primarily a sculptor, who had many of his works publicly displayed. He is known for his stainless steel geometric public sculptures. Among his best-known works are the "Mall's Balls" in Adelaide, and "the Silver Shish Kebab" in Sydney.

Asher Bilu is an Australian artist who creates paintings, sculptures and installations. He has also contributed to several films by Director Paul Cox as production designer. He was born in Israel, and began his career as an artist soon after arriving in Australia in 1956. From the start, his art has been abstract, with particular emphasis on technological experimentation. His technique changes as he investigates the use of new media, but his work always reflects his fascination with light, and his love of music and science, especially cosmology.

Elisabeth Cummings is an Australian artist known for her large abstract paintings and printmaking. She has won numerous awards including Fleurieu Art Prize, The Portia Geach Portrait Prize, The Mosman Art Prize, and The Tattersalls Art Prize. Her work is owned in permanent collections across Australia including Artbank, The Queensland Art Gallery, The Gold Coast City Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. She is notable for receiving recognition later in her career, considered by the Australian Art Collector as one of the 50 most collectible Australian Artists.

Danie Mellor is an Australian artist who was the winner of 2009 National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award. Born in Mackay, Queensland, Mellor grew up in Scotland, Australia, and South Africa before undertaking tertiary studies at North Adelaide School of Art, the Australian National University (ANU) and Birmingham Institute of Art and Design. He then took up a post lecturing at Sydney College of the Arts. He works in different media including printmaking, drawing, painting, and sculpture. Considered a key figure in contemporary Indigenous Australian art, the dominant theme in Mellor's art is the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian cultures.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hossein Valamanesh</span> Iranian-Australian artist (1949–2022)

Hossein Valamanesh was an Iranian-Australian contemporary artist who lived and worked in Adelaide, South Australia. He worked in mixed media, printmaking, installations, and sculpture. He often collaborated with his wife, Angela Valamanesh.

Australian feminist art timeline lists exhibitions, artists, artworks and milestones that have contributed to discussion and development of feminist art in Australia. The timeline focuses on the impact of feminism on Australian contemporary art. It was initiated by Daine Singer for The View From Here: 19 Perspectives on Feminism, an exhibition and publishing project held at West Space as part of the 2010 Next Wave Festival.

Margel Ina Harris Hinder was an Australian-American modernist sculptor, noted for her kinetic and public sculptural works. Her sculptures are found outside the Australian Reserve Bank building in Martin Place, Sydney, in a memorial in Newcastle, New South Wales, and in Canberra, ACT. Her work is held in several Australian public collections.

Lionel Bawden is an Australian visual artist. He lives and works in Sydney, Australia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Udo Sellbach</span>

Udo Sellbach (1927–2006) was a German-Australian visual artist and educator whose work focused primarily around his printmaking practice.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Linde Ivimey</span> Australian sculptor (born 1965)

Linde Ivimey is an Australian sculptor.

Debra Phillips is an Australian artist. Her main practice is photography but she also works across other forms such as sculpture and moving image. She has been an exhibiting artist since the 1980s, is a part of many collections, and has won multiple awards for her work. Phillips resides in Sydney and is a senior lecturer at The College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales.

Robert Owen is an Australian artist and curator. He lives and works in Melbourne, Australia.

Alex Seton is an Australian artist, known for his contemporary use of marble carving. He also works in sculpture, photography, video and installation.

Mazie Karen Turner was an artist from Newcastle, Australia. She worked in photography, sculpture and painting.

John Neylon is a South Australian arts writer and arts educator as well as being an art critic, curator, painter, and printmaker. He is an art critic for The Adelaide Review, an author for Wakefield Press, and a lecturer in art history at Adelaide Central School of Art.

Leonie Reisberg is an Australian photographer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ewa Pachucka</span> Polish-Australian sculptor (1936–2020)

Ewa Pachucka was a Polish-Australian sculptor.

Hertha Kluge-Pott is a German-born Australian printmaker based in Melbourne.

References

  1. 1 2 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. 1 2 Tipping, Richard Kelly (2007). Word art works : Visual poetry and textual objects (Thesis). hdl:10453/52683.
  3. Griffith University art collection. Retrieved 24 March 2012.
  4. 1 2 "Richard Tipping". Friendly Street Poets. 28 June 2008. Retrieved 11 February 2021.
  5. "Home". wordximage.art.
  6. 1 2 3 "Richard Tipping: Art Word". 29 March 2018.
  7. 1 2 "Hear the Art: Visual Poetry as Sculpture".
  8. Powerhouse Museum collection, artist Richard Tipping Retrieved 24 March 2012
  9. "2003 National Sculpture Prize and Exhibition - Richard Tipping - No Understanding". National Gallery of Australia . Retrieved 11 February 2021.
  10. Watermark Public artwork. Retrieved 29 September 2014.
  11. Watermark flooded ABC News Retrieved 30 September 2014
  12. "Watermark flood sculpture Brisbane by Richard Tipping".
  13. "Richard Tipping: Versions Perversions, Subversions & Verse".
  14. Johnson, Ken (8 January 1999). "Art in Review". The New York Times.
  15. "Richard Tipping exhibitions".
  16. "Works by Richard Tipping | Art Gallery of NSW".
  17. "Collections Online | British Museum".
  18. Prints and Printmaking, National Gallery of Australia, 99 images of works Retrieved 24 March 2012.
  19. https://www.heide.com.au
  20. Powerhouse Museum Retrieved 29 September 2014.
  21. "Richard Tipping collections".
  22. <https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/149965/2/b23722873_Caldwell_Sabrina%20Bleecker.pdf>
  23. "Richard Tipping: Instant History". 5 April 2017.
  24. "The art that made me: Richard Tipping".
  25. "Richard Tipping: Art Word". 17 July 2018.
  26. "The artist Tipping the gender balance in street signs".
  27. "Australian Poetry Library".
  28. 1 2 "PressPress Richard Tipping".
  29. https://www.theseflyingislands.com/2021/01/richard-tipping.html?m=0
  30. "The Word as Art", Artlink (Vol 27 No.1, 2007). Retrieved on 29 September 2014.
  31. Tipping, Richard; Friendly Street Poets (1977), The Friendly Street poetry reader, Adelaide University Union Press, ISBN   978-0-9598309-1-0
  32. Tipping, Richard; Tillett, Rob (1968), Mok: A magazine of contemporary dissolution and intemperance, Mok Publications, retrieved 11 February 2021
  33. "Generation of'68 – Printed Shadows – 40 Years of Cultural Journalism".
  34. "Writers Talking | Richard Tipping | ACMI collection".
  35. https://flyingislandspocketpoets.com.au
  36. "Richard Tipping "Subvert I Sing"".
  37. "Works by Richard Tipping | Art Gallery of NSW".
  38. "Airpoet : Word works / By Richard Tipping ; screen printed by Alison White & Richard Tipping - Catalogue | National Library of Australia".
  39. 1 2 3 "Instant History | Australian Galleries".
  40. "Richard Tipping: Versions Perversions, Subversions & Verse". Ubu Gallery. 26 May 2021. Retrieved 3 February 2023.
  41. "Richard Tipping – Artist Talk & Installation at the AGNSW | Australian Galleries".
  42. Sculpture by the Sea Archived 27 September 2014 at the Wayback Machine Retrieved 30 September 2014
  43. Bibliotheca Librorum publisher Retrieved 30 September 2014
  44. Avoiding Myth and Message Retrieved 30 September 2014
  45. National Gallery of Australia Retrieved 30 September 2014