2 - 21 May 2013
about the exhibition
The work of GW Bot engages with the environment in both a topographical and metaphysical sense. Through her uniquevisual language of glyphs, GW Bot maps the landscape, not literally but intuitively, with her markings always born from personal experience. This extensive repertoire of glyph motifs features across her paintings, works on paper and sculptures. In a most basic observation, they are evocative of branches and twigs, and have also been likened to the moth tracks on scribbly gums. Yet her glyphs operate via the links of allusion and association to form abstract landscapes, or more elusively, a map of almost cosmological markings, mapping out the progression of time, seasons or natural events. The title for this exhibition was born from a collaboration between the artist and poet Anne Kirker to produce an artist’s book, which is included in the show. ‘Glyphmetric’, as described by the artist, “combines two concepts, glyphs as a language of the Australian landscape and metric as the language of rhythm, music and dance.” This concept of a lyrical language of landscape and life reflects the spaces, pauses and silences of art and existence. In all variations of her work, GW Bot combines a mastery of technique with an unlimited creativity and intuitive sensitivity.
GW Bot draws her exhibiting name from a French document citing the earliest written reference to a wombat or ‘le grand Wam Bot’. Her decision to adopt this reference to the wombat as her namesake stems from her appreciation of Aboriginal totemic belief, where each member of a clan inherits a totemic relationship with a particular plant or animal of the region. GW Bot studied art in London, Paris and Australia, graduating from the Australian National University in 1982. She has been a full-time artist since 1985 and has held a plethora of solo exhibitions in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane, Perth, London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles and Manila. Her work is represented in over one hundred public collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, Albertina (Vienna), British Museum (London), Victoria and Albert Museum (London), Bibliotheque Nationale (Paris) and Fogg Museum of Fine Arts (Harvard University, USA), as well as numerous Australian regional galleries, corporate collections and domestic and international tertiary, college and academy art collections.
