Richard Tipping

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

As a poet he has published three books of poems with University of Queensland Press, which are available on Poetry Library, and more recent collections such as Tommy Ruff (2014) and Instant History (2017) His poems are represented in many anthologies, such as the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry and the New Oxford Book of Australian Verse.

In 2007 Tipping completed a doctorate at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) titled Word Art Works: visual poetry and textual objects.

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

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

In 1975 Tipping co-founded the ongoing Friendly Street Poets, which began open-mic poetry readings in Adelaide, and edited their first anthology The Friendly Street Poetry Reader in 1977. Between 1984 and 1986 he lived in Europe and England with his family, while making documentaries about ex-patriate writers such as Randolph Stow in Sussex, Peter Porter in London, Jack Lindsay in Cambridge, and David Malouf in Tuscany.

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

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 (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 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.

Richard Kelly Tipping (born 1949) is an Australian poet and artist best known for his extensive practice in visual poetry and word art including artsigns, textual sculpture, subvertising graphics, and large-scale public artworks both permanent and temporary. Examples of his work are illustrated in the collections of many public galleries including The Art Gallery of New South Wales, and The British Museum.

Tipping was born into a medical family Adelaide in 1949, and studied film, philosophy and literature at Flinders University, graduating in 1972. After a year in Sydney which included exhibiting with Aleks Danko at Watters Gallery he travelled in the USA and lived in San Francisco meeting with poets including Michael McClure, returning to Adelaide in 1975 where he began working with the South Australian Film Corporation until 1978.