Emma Walker
Emma Walker consistently and evocatively engages with the natural world, looking at the patterns and rhythms that recur in nature. Carving, sanding, digging, grinding, glazing, dripping and scratching into layered timber, the artist creates a unique process and approach to her sculptural wall paintings. By working in this way, Walker occupies an undefined space in contemporary art bridging aspects of painting, relief sculpture and installation into single works.
From ancient landscapes of sea, rock and sky to the microscopic patterns and rhythms that power existence, her work moves between the micro and the macro in a formative dance. As much about the process of painting as they are with visually imprinting the Australian environment, Walker’s unique imagery emerges from a combination of experimentation and automaticity, each mark growing from the next in a catalytic reaction that emulates the geological occurrences that cause continents to move and shorelines to reshape, etching on the faces of rocks, rivers and ravines.
Walker has been exhibiting for over thirty years. Her career has enjoyed the strong support of patrons Ann Lewis AO, Nick Waterlow, OAM and Julian Beaumont OAM. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the National Art School, Sydney, and she has also studied in Italy and travelled extensively. She was a finalist in the Paddington Art Prize (2017, 2013, 2010, 2008) and winner of the prestigious Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award (2014). 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, Lismore Regional Gallery, Tweed Regional Gallery & Margaret Olley Art Centre and Bathurst Regional Gallery, in addition to various private collections in Australia, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Emma has been teaching for over ten years. Her teaching style is energetic and highly motivated. Her classes are challenging and designed to get you thinking, experimenting and producing.
"Emma Walker is one of Australia's most convincing and original painters. Her work is as audacious as it is poetic; the one quality leavens the other, so that just as delicate reverie sets in, you're pulled up by a less immediately seductive note, an act of painterly boldness or some other form of tough, enlivening aesthetic decision… these are intelligent paintings - intelligent in their understanding of ambiguities, of space, and of colour." Sebastian Smee, Art Critic, Boston Globe
