A BALLARAT-born artist has returned home to showcase his works as part of an exhibition on at the Art Gallery of Ballarat.<\/p>\n
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 \u201ca homecoming\u201d for him.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s being back home, and the long journey since I ran away from home at the age of 16 until now has been\u2026 fully creative the whole time,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI said to myself one day the Ballarat Art Gallery will lay a red carpet from the train station to the gallery and they\u2019ll be a brass band at the entrance welcoming me home.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat dream has come true in a more practical and realistic manner.\u201d<\/p>\n
The exhibition features 42 of Walker\u2019s collage works and assemblage sculptures created as far back as 1983.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was very interested in the Dadaists and surrealists,\u201d he said. \u201cThey liberated the imagination and that\u2019s what I was all about.<\/p>\n
\u201cI 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\u2019s part of my practice.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m interested in how one can express the human condition in ways that don\u2019t rely on beauty. I deal with the unconscious a good deal as did the Dadaists and surrealists.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn a way, it\u2019s a permanence to dreams if you do it well. I\u2019ve attempted to create my own original language and I think I have succeeded.\u201d<\/p>\n
Time Traveller is on show until Sunday, 5 February.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 \u201ca homecoming\u201d for him. \u201cIt\u2019s […]<\/p>\n