January 15-16, 2024
Lake Ballard has become much more widely known since you can enter the largest outdoor art gallery on Earth – the Inside Australia exhibit created by world-renowned artist Antony Gormley. Here, stretching across 10 square kilometres, a collection of 51 individually cast black chromium steel sculptures stand against the dramatic backdrop of Lake Ballard’s white salt plain.
The 2003 Perth Festival commissioned Gormley to create an installation at a cost of $650,000 to celebrate its 50th anniversary. Gormley decided the best way to represent the human form at Lake Ballard was to get the locals – those who live in the interior- involved in a unique way. He approached the people of nearby Menzies, found 51 volunteers, and made a three dimensional, exact-height body scan of each person.
After this, Gormley sourced local raw metals to create an alloy to make the sculptures – another reason they truly are from Inside Australia. The result was 51 metal statuettes spread over roughly 10 square kilometres of the Lake’s surface. Although the installation was supposed to be temporary, Gormley gifted it to WA for $1.
There is a large camping area here with tables and BBQs; a quick look around here before qe take to the Lake itself:
Unfortunately, there had been a few short thunderstorms in the whole region over the previous week, and the Lake was mostly too wet to walk on but we did, with some muddy shoes, manage to walk around at least a dozen of the 51 statues; to walk them all would be a walk of maybe 7 to 8 kms.
