G W Bot Hieroglyphs (Requiem)
G. W. Bot Hieroglyphs (Requiem).
G W BOT (Australian, b. 1954)
Requiem 2003 350cm x 70cm Acquired 109714 |  |
Biography:
G.W. Bot is a contemporary Australian printmaker, sculptor, painter and graphic artist who has created her own signs and glyphs to capture her close, personal relationship with the Australian landscape. Her artist’s name derives from ‘le grand Wam Bot’ after the early French explorers’ term for the wombat which she has adopted as her totemic animal.
GW Bot studied 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 over sixty solo exhibitions in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane, Perth, London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles and Manila.
She has participated in and been represented in numerous curated survey museum exhibitions, on both a national and international basis. Notable exhibitions have been the touring survey, ‘The Long Paddock’ organised by the Goulburn Regional Art Gallery from 2010 to 2013; the ‘Out of Australia’ exhibition presented at the British Museum, London in 2011; ‘Australia’ at the Royal Academy, London, 2013 and the ‘National Gallery Contemporary’ Canberra, 2014.
Most recently, GW Bot was included in the prestigious exhibition ‘Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now (Part 1) at the National Gallery of Australia.
Her work is represented in more than one hundred public collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, The Albertina (Vienna), British Museum (London), Victoria and Albert Museum (London), Bibliothèque 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.
Artwork:
The prints, paintings and sculptures of GW Bot invariably focus on the environment in both a topographic and metaphysical sense, the latter of which encompasses the notion of time and passage; each work is conceived as a journey of sorts.
Bot has developed her own unique visual language of glyphs or marks, which she employs to ‘map’ the landscape, not in a literal sense, but more intuitively – with her markings always born from personal experience.
The subject artwork comprises seven figurative bronze elements, styled after the artist’s calligraphic and gestural markings inherent to her 2D works – prints and paintings. More particularly, the work relates to a series of editioned prints “Requiem”, produced by Bot, “after reading the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova’s poem of the same name. Additionally, the work (and the print series) is the artist’s response to the natural grasslands and landscape which has been her source material for many years, and its susceptibility to drought, fire, urban development and climate change.[1]
The artwork was exhibited at Canberra Museum and Art Gallery in 2003 before being acquired by the University in #
Bibliography:
Grishin, Sasha, Australian Printmaking in the 1990s: Artist Printmakers 1990-1995, Craftsman House, 1997
View: more works by G W Bot in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, and the British Museum.
[1] https://www.strathnairn.com.au/blog/in-conversation-with-gw-bot
The artist in conversation with Strathnarin Arts, 16 June 2020