Australian artist Nara Walker was imprisoned in Iceland — now she's painting to process her trauma

Australia Broadcast Center

14-05-2025

Sitting in the Sunshine Coast heat on a back porch with artist Nara Walker feels worlds away from an Icelandic prison.
It's humid and water condenses in small dots on Walker's nose — but the story she tells is chilling.
"You have to wear your own clothes in Icelandic prisons. I kept away from stripey things, because I was like, 'I don't want to feel like I'm in prison,'" Walker says, between bites of leftover pizza, and sips of a nettle tea she shipped over from Iceland.
"I had these white pants that I ended up painting and, once I was out of prison and I wore them out, I got so many compliments on them … I remember this American, a sweet young woman, telling me how much she loved my pants. And I was like, 'Yeah, I painted them when I was in prison,' and she just gave me this really weird look."
It's been seven years since Walker's name was splashed across international headlines after being convicted for assaulting her then partner and being imprisoned in a high-security jail near Reykjavik.
Through it all, she painted — a creative expression that helped her endure; that has always helped her.
"I'm making very expressionistic art … in that it's moved through my emotions. It's created as a response to something," she says.
"My experience with facing a court system, facing a travel ban, all of that would be so different because, no matter what, I was never alone because I had my art. I always had a form of expression."
It's been four years since Walker, who was released from Hólmsheiði Prison in May 2019, returned to Australia.
In the garden shed-turned art studio in her mum's backyard in Queensland, Walker paints fast, finishing a few paintings a week.
The practice helps her to reconnect to herself, process traumatic memories and heal.
Though she doesn't see her work as art therapy.
"My work is therapeutic but I am an artist, in the forefront," she says.
She's also, since her return to Australia, been fighting — alongside several other women, backed by Icelandic women's and equality organisations — for Iceland to change how it investigates and prosecutes violence against women.
The women are suing Iceland for what they allege is a failure to protect them from gender-based violence and inadequate investigation of their claims. A judgement from the European Court of Human Rights is forthcoming.
In 2018, Walker was involved in an incident with her then-partner, in which she, as her mother would later tell an Iceland court, "defended herself when he stuck his tongue right down her throat and she bit down on his tongue and took off the tip of it". Walker was arrested soon after.
"I didn't really understand what I had done. I was kind of observing myself from outside of my body," Walker says.
"Suddenly, the police were there and I was just in a state of shock and kind of shaking on the stairs and not really understanding the whole thing of what had just happened.
"The police came in, they ended up handcuffing me, and I just … kept repeating that I was the victim."
In her trial in Iceland, Walker gave evidence detailing years of abuse from her partner, including text messages where he admitted putting the drug LSD in her tea. But the Icelandic system does not always recognise a woman's experience of domestic violence as a defence for assault.
Her ex-partner has denied the abuse allegations.
Three difficult years navigating Iceland's legal system followed — but Walker employed art as a survival tool whenever she could.
Before she was formally convicted, her passport was confiscated. She became homeless, was eating at a soup kitchen and rapidly lost weight. Her hair began to fall out.
Stories about her made national and international media. It wasn't until weeks later, when the news died down, that women's shelters in Reykjavik agreed to see her.
When she first arrived at a shelter, she didn't have art materials so she used her phone to create. She made a video featuring black and white images of her face, switching between dead stares and grainy screams.
"I called it Silent Scream because the images really capture the angst of what I was experiencing in that moment in time. It's such an internal journey of pain and suffering."
Walker would come to learn that while Iceland is reported to be the world's most gender-equal country, statistics of gender-based and sexual violence are high, and accounts of mishandling of cases by police and courts remain common.
Walker was convicted of assault on March 7, 2018, and was handed a 12-month sentence. On appeal, her sentence was increased to 18 months, with 15 months suspended. Walker ultimately spent one month in high-security prison and two in a community facility.
In prison, where Walker was allowed paints and markers, she says she wanted to "fall to the ground and scream, cry and rip my hair out, but I had to hold composure".
"I had different tactics, which was my art, movement [and] writing.
"I was painting and drawing lots and lots of abstract faces," she says.
"It was really interesting. I was like, 'Maybe these faces are all these people who have been experiencing trauma like my own,' and in some way, it's almost like I'm not alone — I had these faces with me.
"Some of them are really scary … and dark."
Walker made a lot of paintings in prison, about 75, and later exhibited them in Reykjavik in an exhibition called Room.
"I filled the wall with all of these pieces, and was very lucky to then connect with the arts community there."
She served her three-month term and was released in May 2019. The suspended portion of her sentence expired in August 2020.
Unable to leave the country until her suspended sentence was over and passport returned, Walker lived in a halfway house, then began staying in artist residencies around Iceland.
"I was making so much art … I started to connect with this resilient side of myself, not just the survivor.
"It was a very pinnacle point where I was able to connect with who I was before all of this because art is who I am."
Walker returned to Australia in 2019 to the sanctuary of her mum's Sunshine Coast house, which backs onto a quiet patch of tropical scrub. She nonchalantly mentions to watch out for pythons — a small-fry threat for her nowadays.
Entering her backyard studio, Walker readies to paint. A small fan hums, pushing away the oily fumes.
She squeezes paint directly on her gloves and mixes hues using her fingertips. She's almost trance-like as she smears her hands across the canvas.
Her physical approach to art-making has been integral to healing.
"Some people sit down and they paint small pictures. I'm standing up, I'm moving, I'm using my whole body to paint," she says.
"I'm not just talking like I do in my talk therapy — which is really helpful, but I need the physical therapy in art and movement as well."
Sometimes the movements are fast, other times very slow, pushing and scraping the paint against the surface.
"Painting is very meditative for me. It's a very calming act and also simultaneously exciting," Walker says.
"My process in creating is very physical, and a part of being physical is also enabling my body to share that subconscious language, which lives within me."
She says her work has sometimes been described as "grotesque", due to the colour and the marks.
"I feel like sometimes my work has been judged by others … it doesn't look pretty, or it's not like what is supposedly feminine."
Walker refuses to be influenced by that kind of judgement.
"I was aware of this side of me coming out … I went into this space just allowing myself to make chaotic, messy art."
Walker feels she can express herself now in a way she couldn't in Iceland.
"Being in my studio and just being at home, it's done something with my nervous system, where I feel safe to express myself more vividly.
"A lot of the work that I'm making in my studio is processing being in my body again here, back home in Australia, which means that I'm also processing what happened to me in Iceland.
"I'm not stuffing those emotions back down inside of me. I'm able to just let them free.
"I want to be able to just speak and be seen as who I am."