As a finishing touch to the new Ballarat station precinct, a major work of public art will soon be installed.
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The sculpture, 'Slow Order', will be made from old rails taken from the Goods Shed itself, cut up and repurposed to make a "flowing" curve outside the station.
Sculptor Robbie Rowlands, who has previously exhibited works at the Ballarat International Foto Biennale, said he was excited to get started on the project in-person after months of design work.
"This week was quite amazing, I could actually come up here and work with Lloyds Metal Fabricators, and cut the rail," he said.
"It was the first time I really got to spend a lot of quality time with the rail, I've spent time sitting with it to go through the ideas but this was really working with the material, and that's been nice."
The sculpture will be about eight metres long and seven metres high, and uses sections from 34 lengths of rail cut and shaped.
The project, tendered by developer Pellicano, consultant Lovell Chen, and the state government, has received Heritage Victoria approval, Mr Rowlands added.
"It had fairly specific parameters, it had to be a sculpture with heritage railway track - there were tonnes of tracks sitting there - and the aim was to devise a sculpture with that material that would then be a sculptural form installed in front of the Goods Shed in the station precinct," he said.
"The hard thing about rail is one metre of it, you can't even lift it - and most of the material was 10m long.
"I had to define a work so I could work practically with forklifts, and sculptural processes that didn't demand hiring a crane."
The intention is to reflect the heritage significance of the precinct, combining the flowing curves of cursive script with the heavy industry Ballarat was renowned for.
"It was the perfect way to balance that," Mr Rowlands said.
"When you're looking at it, it's a really graceful curved form that drops down to just under a metre, a really lovely flow.
"There's a lot of industries and communities connected to rail in Ballarat, it was the major producer of steam engines, and these tracks could have come from Ballarat originally, so there's a lot of history of what's going on here - it's not ambiguous, but loose enough so people can come to this with their own way of thinking."
Mr Rowlands has made a career of reusing materials that would have otherwise been destroyed or demolished in his art, and the opportunity to create a large-scale sculpture was an easy one to jump at.
"I look for ways to reform that material and introduce ideas, rather than other material," he explained.
"A lot of those works are temporary works, some become temporary, but I've had a lot of fun out there in the landscape.
"The beauty of sculpture and found objects is that material costs can be quite low, if not for free, so you can actually do fairly large-scale sculptures and get away with it for a pretty low price.
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"When it comes to public art, I can do significant large-scale works within modest budgets."
The work is expected to be complete by mid-year.
The multi-million dollar Ballarat station precinct redevelopment includes a new multi-storey commuter car park and hotel, which have already been completed, and a large retail, hospitality, and conference space in the bluestone Goods Shed, which is still under construction.
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