Murray Walker (b. 1937 ) is a distinguished printmaker, a significant and recognised painter, a pioneering assemblage sculptor and collage artist, a ceramicist, a prolific tapestry designer and a nationally renowned and widely published authority on Australian colonial arts. His art is tough, challenging, at times unpalatable and frequently unfashionable. There is a visual curiosity, excitement and intensity in his art and a certain 'compression' where something that initially looks simple and directly engages the eye, on further viewing, becomes immensely complex, cerebral and in need of close and prolonged contemplation. Once you allow yourself to enter the world of Murray Walker you will be surprised, amused, horrified, delighted and inspired.

Murray Walker recycles, copies, steals and reclaims that which came before him to create a new reality, one which distinctly bears his hallmark, but retains traces of earlier makers. As an artist, he is a boundary rider, one who embraces street art, graffiti and folk crafts, yet remains an old-fashioned maker of beautifully crafted pictures that are anchored in the conventions of the old masters.

Sasha Grishin AM, FAHA is an Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University in Canberra, who works internationally as an art historian, art critic and curator. He studied at the universities of Melbourne, Moscow, London and Oxford and has served several terms as visiting scholar at Harvard University. In 2004 he was elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, in 2005 he was awarded the Order of Australia (AM) for services to Australian art and art history and in 2008 was awarded a Citation for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning. He has published over thirty books and over two thousand articles and catalogue essays dealing with various aspects of art. In 2013 his massive Australian Art: A history was published by Melbourne University Publishing and in 2015 his monographs on John Wolseley (Thames and Hudson), Inge King (Macmillan) and S.T. Gill (National Library of Australia) were published and in 2022 his books on Erwin Fabian and Joyce Evans appeared in print.

Hardcover book, 268 pages
28.5 cm by 22.5 cm 3.5 cm
$75

I Shed My Skin, A Furneaux Islands Story evolved out of an exhibition of Jane Giblin’s artwork which toured Tasmania in 2019. It revolves around strangers who come to a remote land and learn how to win a living from it. Traditions and relationships to the Furneaux Islands, built since the 1890s, were consolidated across five generations. During the latter part of the twentieth century significant changes had to be met.

Giblin travelled up and down the eastern seaboard of Australia interviewing her father’s cousins in addition to some senior Furneaux community members. She knew there was art to be made and stories to tell from their island lives. She sought memories of her great grandparents, feelings about the islands, and farming and birding as well as how they were acclimatizing to changed land access and tradition due to successful land rights claims by local First Nations people.

Giblin’s part-collaborator on her exhibition and book is retired lecturer in geography and well-known Tasmanian writer, Pete Hay. Hay accompanied Giblin on some of her visits to people and island places of significance; his wit, grit and heart providing a rich sounding board. His poetry and prose add significantly to Jane’s observations and artwork in this beautifully presented publication.