A FORMER School of Mines graduate has recently had his 45-year-old piece of art acquired by the Art Gallery of Ballarat.
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Ray Hearn graduated with a diploma of art in 1970, but it is only recently that he found out a piece of art completed in his graduating year will appear in the gallery's permanent collection.
As part of his university assessment Hearn was asked to source his own clays and minerals from the local area to create his own masterpiece.
But it was his unusual way of thinking that inspired Hearn to think outside the box with his design.
"Instead of functional ware my mind began to wander elsewhere," he said.
"This work is composed of prints/tracks that I dug up from the soft clay of a mullock heap at Bet Bet near Dunolly, where my mother was living.
"Trained as a potter and used to digging my own clay, I was quite interested in what seemed to be a good yellow clay, and field tests suggested that it would fire well.
"But, I realised that something much more important had happened - the mullock heap clay carried the imprints of the recent activity on the old mine site, a record of time passing, a veritable little history of the earth itself.
"I was quite excited about this I dug up just with a spade some tiles of these tracks - roo, sheep, dog, rabbit, man, bike, truck and so on and took them home to the studio."
After retrieving his foot print tiles from the kiln, Mr Hearn rubbed them with iron oxide to bring up any texture.
"Looking back, it is very much a 1970's piece, when art could be inspired by the actual making as much as the end product," he said.
It is expected Hearn's A Child of the Seventies piece will be on display in the gallery's permanent collection in August.