Artist’s new show a home coming

A BALLARAT-born artist has returned home to showcase his works as part of an exhibition on at the Art Gallery of Ballarat.

Murray Walker has been visiting the gallery since he was a child with his grandmother, and said his new display Time Traveller, which launched last week, serves as “a homecoming” for him.

“It’s being back home, and the long journey since I ran away from home at the age of 16 until now has been… fully creative the whole time,” he said.

“I said to myself one day the Ballarat Art Gallery will lay a red carpet from the train station to the gallery and they’ll be a brass band at the entrance welcoming me home.

“That dream has come true in a more practical and realistic manner.”

The exhibition features 42 of Walker’s collage works and assemblage sculptures created as far back as 1983.

He refers to the assemblages as three-dimensional collages and travelogues from his time in Europe during the early 1980s, with his creativity influenced by a childhood in Ballarat and artists like Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch and Hieronymus Bosch.

“I was very interested in the Dadaists and surrealists,” he said. “They liberated the imagination and that’s what I was all about.

“I grew up when Ballarat was in wartime mode and there was an emphasis on frugality and being careful not to waste. That has stayed with me ever since and I think that’s part of my practice.

“I’m interested in how one can express the human condition in ways that don’t rely on beauty. I deal with the unconscious a good deal as did the Dadaists and surrealists.

“In a way, it’s a permanence to dreams if you do it well. I’ve attempted to create my own original language and I think I have succeeded.”

Time Traveller is on show until Sunday, 5 February.