Concrete PoetryThe Heide Collection

This resource explores Concrete Poetry. The video was created for the exhibition Born to Concrete: The Heide Collection (2011) which examined the emergence of Concrete Poetry in Australia in the mid-1960s and its subsequent developments.

Concrete Poetry is where the visual arts meets language. It focuses on the visual appearance of language, including the typography of words. This cross pollination between art and literature takes many forms including typed words on a page, lettraset, printmaking, sculpture, found objects, photography and more.

Artists Sweeney Reed, Alan Riddell and Alex Selenitsch were central figures in the development of Concrete Poetry in Australia. This new form of visual poetry was soon taken up by others, including Ruth Cowen, Aleks Danko, Jas H. Duke, Peter Murphy, TT.O, Mike Parr and Richard Tipping.