Cosmic Seed
- Richard Tipping

Book launch of Hear the Art: Visual Poetry as Sculpture
2pm – 5pm Saturday 15 October 2022
Remarks from Stuart Purves at 3pm
Followed by a reading from Richard Tipping

At the centre of this dynamic exhibition of work by Richard Tipping is the development and visual exploration of the Cosmic Seed, envisioned as the repeating image of the Cosmic Egg.

“The ‘cosmic egg’ as a term has use in astrophysics as a term to describe the theoretical moment of infinite density (a spacetime singularity) just before the Big Bang, as controversial as this imagined instantaneous creation may remain. The ‘cosmic egg’ as an idea also has deep roots in many cultures’ mythologies as an ancient concept symbolising the moment in which the creativity of God (name your god, ‘godness’ if you like) appears from the darkness of infinity before there was light and makes what will become life. Language is the essence of our success as social creatures capable of cooperation and compassion yet selfishly motivated as tribes to dominate each other.  

I designed what I called the Cosmic Code as a graphic in 2000, and made test versions carved in wood and engraved into oval-shaped granite sheet. 

When I showed these early examples to an artist acquaintance who is Buddhist he mocked their design as a “Sunday school illustration”. Presumably he was thinking of how the Buddha viewed all of the prevalent gods as sentient beings trapped in the same cycle of Samsara and suffering as human beings; deities being unnecessary in Buddhism. The Bible, the Torah and the Quran are powerful scripts, no matter how invented. Suddenly doubting the veracity of the icon, I put it aside for twenty years. Eventually I felt that my Buddhist friend was completely wrong. This typograph feels familiar, as if it has always existed, and yet is new and of its own kind (sui generis), waiting to be memed.” – Richard Tipping, 2022

As well as exhibiting works from Tippings Cosmic Seed, Code Red and Prime Time series’, Australian Galleries is delighted to be launching the book Hear the Art: Visual Poetry as Sculpture on Saturday 15 October at 2pm.

Hear the Art is the essential poetry-as-art collection, loaded with Richard Tipping’s elegant, wry and telling concrete poems made as sculpture and as picture. He is fascinated by words found within words, and articulating their iterations.

Tipping works with poetic language in visual forms and physical media ranging from animated neon, slump glass, engraved marble and screenprint to large-scale public sculptures in steel, granite and electric lights. Typographic designs move off the page, becoming independent poem objects until — while living in the artworld as things — they are photographed, and return to the page. This book is full of realised ideas, a rich panoply of word art demanding to be seen, heard and remembered.