Forest Song is a meditation on trees as enduring lifeforms that hold memory and mark the passage of time.

Braidwood-based artist John R. Walker’s work is informed by decades dedicated to walking, drawing, recording and exploring nature. Walker has travelled widely, spending time in the forest and gullies in Badja, tracing the banks of the Murray River, and journeying through the expansive Flinders Ranges. He reads the land as complex and fragmentary, where experience is shaped by who we are and how we encounter places. As Walker describes, his work is about “taking his perception and transforming it into a pattern of marks.”

Walker’s practice is informed by diverse disciplines such as mapping, geological history, environmental history, mathematical theory, and poetry, all of which shape his understanding of how landscapes are formed, encountered, and remembered. Inspired by Australian poet Les Murray’s line describing trees as “stood scrolls best read unopened,” Walker captures the resilient presence of trees, evoking stories held deep beneath the surface.

Old trees stand as solitary figures within his work, bearing witness to change, collapse, and renewal. Walker records trees in all their states — expansive, grand, reaching and full of energy — through to those in decline, with missing limbs and hollow, rotting cores. Even at the end of life, these trees remain vital: supporting new growth, offering habitat, and sustaining the living systems around them.

In Walker’s practice, space is time, and landscape is something to be felt as much as seen.

In this exhibition, Walker returns to an evocative palette of rich blacks and tones of blue, a hallmark of his early career. Forest Song presents immersive large-scale painted ‘portraits’ of trees, expressive drawings and fresh, immediate monotypes that capture the movement of light and fleeting moments in time.

Walker is an acclaimed artist whose work has been exhibited and collected both nationally and internationally, and his work is held in major national and state collections. Forest Song marks a bold moment in his continually evolving practice, highlighting the artist’s enduring curiosity and deep connection to the land.