Emma Walker

Born 1969, Sydney, Australia 

Lives & Works – Mullumbimby (Bundjalung)

Through an active curiosity and engagement with the natural environment Emma Walker seeks to form tactile and conceptual connections between the world she inhabits and the world within. Walker’s practice is exploratory and open ended with a continually expanding scope of enquiry that incorporates the use of timber, paint, clay, drawing materials, collage, photography, found objects, fabric, video and the written word. Her unique imagery emerges from a combination of experimentation and automaticity with each action and decision informing the next.

Walker’s visual language frequently refers to the micro and macro patterns and rhythms that occur in the natural world, whilst also observing and investigating the nature of consciousness and formations of her own psychology and personal history.  Ideas, experimental processes, introspection and a reverence for materials and their capacities are the foundations of her practice.

Walker has been exhibiting for over thirty years.  She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the National Art School, Sydney and also studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Perugia. She has been a finalist in the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award (2024), Wollumbin Art Award (2024), Paddington Art Prize (2017, 2013, 2010, 2008) and winner of the prestigious Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award (2014) and joint winner of Waterhouse Natural Science Art Prize (2020).  She has been an invited Artist in Residence at Hill End and Glasshouse, Port Macquarie. Walker has held numerous exhibitions in both Sydney and Melbourne and her work features in several major public and corporate collections including Macquarie Bank, Australian Club, Sydney, Tweed Regional Gallery and Margaret Olley Art Centre, Lismore Regional Gallery, Tamworth Regional Gallery in addition to various private collections in Australia, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom and the United States.