Artist and poet Richard Tipping is known for his large-scale sculpture and public works incorporating his own poetic texts in media including granite, steel, aluminium, neon and LED. A recurring theme throughout the artist’s oeuvre has been to pair poetry with sculptural objects; asking if innate attributes such as "density, potency, poignancy and memorability... could be 'translated' into objects which integrate and embody text”.[1] Dearth was an early and seminal example of this pursuit, created for Tipping’s first solo exhibition The Everlasting Stone at the Adelaide Festival Centre gallery in 1978. The artist expresses that the single word concept grew from his interest in words-within-words, preferencing brevity and a move away from lyrical poetry.[2] The exhibition works were formed from scrap granite and marble provided by the Monier Granite stoneyard and allowed Tipping to play with the concept of monumentalism—crafting power and gravitas from overlooked waste material.
Now located in woodland overlooking the University’s central lake, the slab of granite interacts with its natural setting to evoke both absence and vitality. Within the poem, grounding and generative words include ‘earth’ and ‘art’ alongside the sparser ‘dearth’ and desolate ‘death’. Tipping definitively states: “From nothing comes everything in a magical rebirth.”[3]
[1] Richard Tipping, ”Word art works: visual poetry and textual objects,“ (PhD diss., University of Technology Sydney, 2007), http://hdl.handle.net/10453/52683.
[2] Shevaun Rutherford, “Dearth,” In Empire Times, Seasons of Change, 46, no.1 (2019): 33.
[3] Rutherford, “Dearth”: 33.
