7 April – 1 May 2016
about the exhibition
The prints, paintings and sculpture of GW Bot engage with the environment in a topographic and metaphysical sense and can be interpreted as an allegory for a person’s passage through time.On her present body of work, she comments “In my work I view nature and the landscape as active collaborators: they are part of me and I am part of them. For the past four decades I have been based mainly in Canberra and have worked in the landscape on the Monaro plateau and the Murrumbidgee River system. Working for several decades in this landscape I have devised a type of alphabet or language, a system of marks, which have been drawn from literally many thousands of quick sketches that I have made in the landscape. These markings I have called “glyphs”. A collection of glyphs may be assembled to enable me to tell a story, a narrative that comes from the land itself. These glyphs I have realised in a number of different mediums, including linocuts, etchings and lithographs, as well as paintings, drawings and monumental stone carvings, bronzes, steel relief sculptures and most recently ceramics.” A note of urgency is evident in this exhibition as the natural environment is now increasingly under threat.
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 is an internationally renowned artist who has held over fifty solo exhibitions and whose art is represented in over a hundred public collections internationally, including The National Gallery of Australia, Albertina (Vienna), British Museum (London), Victoria and Albert Museum (London), Bibliothèquenationale (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.
