Richard Tipping is an Australian artist and poet who continually blurs the boundaries between the verbal and the visual, creating amusing typographical art.
Tipping’s artistic breakthrough emerged through what he terms “interventions” – temporary alterations to traffic signs on the streets of Adelaide and Sydney during the late 1970s and early 1980s, using tape to change or obscure existing text. These guerrilla actions evolved into his signature “artsigns,” sophisticated works that appropriate the visual language of Australian road signage to create unexpected poetic encounters.
His methodology is both subversive and celebratory. Taking imagery, text, and forms from classic Australian road signs, Tipping cleverly subverts their familiar meanings, transforming mundane civic communication into direct and provocative statements. The works often address hierarchical structures and colonial legacies while engaging with the public language of the street through unexpected poetic interventions that extend our experience of public space into new, metaphorical territories.
