Like the added indignity for a wombat killed on the road to be spray-painted with a cross once it has been checked for live young. Or, the seemingly subliminal messages plastered on the sides of freight trucks for a major supermarket chain.

Fredericks said once one stopped to really look at their surroundings, one could hardly help but question why some things were considered normal.

"We gaze over so much in busy lives and things become normal," Fredericks said.

"The purpose in my work being to show the odd or different things people do to get attention and the patterns and systems that get repeated without question.

"The notion of normal is totally invented but that becomes the adopted position."

Fredericks' new exhibition Normalcy, presented by The RAT Art Space, features the seemingly commonplace, normal things from daily life.

The exhibition officially opened at Old Butcher's Shop Gallery on Seymour Street last week and Fredericks said he was not sure how the works would be received - but a lot of people "got it".

Fredericks said while interpretation often came back to personal experience, the biggest compliment he got was when people would tell him later they had started to look at normal differently, too.

For his exhibition he calls this awareness as noticing "the ubiquitous haze of the absurd hidden in plain sight, driving normalcy."

Normalcy is a selection of Fredericks' smaller-scale sculptural works.

Fredericks said he continued to be "blown away" by the number of people turning out to support art in Ballarat and the great spaces, like Old Butcher's Shop Gallery, with owners prepared to showcase exhibitions.

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Growing up, Fredericks was encouraged to experiment with materials by his mother, who was an artist. In the 1990s, Fredericks exhibited and sold his work to galleries in Melbourne and on the New South Wales' south coast but it was later, working at Big Fish in Footscray, that Fredericks regarded his "true creative apprenticeship".

Big Fish created large-scale public and private sculptural commissions. He said this time was pivotal in learning what could be possible in small teams of creatives and these were key lessons he brought in moving to Ballarat in 2004.

Normalcy is scheduled to run until February 28. Should Victoria's snap lockdown lift, the exhibition is open to viewings on Fridays, 5-7pm, and weekends, 12-4pm, or by appointment with the gallery.