Emma's childhood was spent living between Sydney and south-western NSW as well as traveling around the world with her family. She studied at the National Art School and has also studied in Italy and traveled extensively.

Emma Walker’s practice consistently engages with the natural world. An explorer at heart Walker has informed her visual language through extensive travel and an inbuilt desire to constantly engage with the world around her. This passion has resulted in a practice that displays a keen sensitivity for colour, form and texture. Walker’s paintings are multi-layered, being as much about the medium of paint as with an experience of the Australian landscape and represent the outcome of a career-long obsession with the process of observing and respecting nature. Her work is represented in numerous private and corporate collections such as Bathurst Regional Gallery, Macquarie Group and the Tweed Gallery Collection. In recent years she has twice been selected for the Paddington Art Prize and the Alice Prize.

'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

'Emma uses abstract forms and many layers of paint to create an array of different textural effects. Her work explores the connections between landscape, memory and the subconscious. She has an instinctive understanding of colour and there is an extreme play of light and dark in her abstracted landscapes which creates a dreamlike dimension.'
Tim Olsen