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.”

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 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.

Image: John R Walker, Stump, 2025, synthetic polymer on polyester, 263 x 202 cm. Image courtesy Utopia Gallery and the artist.