The relationship between the landscape and its inhabitants - and the essential connections that bind us to it is the point of departure for much of Martin King’s work. His earlier, abstracted prints and paintings draw aesthetically on the terrain’s rolling undulations and the patterns of weather that traverse its surface as seen from an aerial point of view. King possesses a naturally rhythmic style of mark-making, with its linear qualities often speaking of rivulets and eddies, or rain streaking a dust filled sky.

In his more recent work the black cormorant, whose home is the Murray-Darling river system, forms the simple motif that conveys the essential fragility of our relationship with water. King also touches on the devastation experienced when this relationship begins to break down, seen through his melancholy depiction of a solitary bird in flight. Through his recent paintings, prints and animated films which explore this imagery, King has established a particularly haunting vision of the Australian bush that renders both its vulnerability and its unyielding brutality.(Marguerite Brown, 2009)