For the past four decades artist GW Bot has been based in Canberra, specifically in Belconnen, and has worked in the surrounding landscape of the Monaro plateau, the remnant grasslands of Canberra and the Murrumbidgee River corridor. Her work views nature and landscape as active collaborators. They are a part of her as she is of them.
Her philosophy and practice reflect James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis that the organic and inorganic elements on earth form a complex, self-regulating system that maintain the conditions for life on the planet and that human intervention, the Anthropocene Epoch, threatens the earth’s stability and in turn threatens human survival.
To capture and convey her relationship with and in the landscape, Bot has developed a type of language, a system of traces and marks that she created from literally thousands of quick sketches made in the landscape. She calls these markings ‘glyphs’ or sometimes ‘Austral-glyphs’ denoting their antipodean origins. She assembles collections of glyphs to form narratives that come from the land and that offer a portrait of the land as well as a portrait of the artist. This exhibition, ‘Portrait of a landscape’, curated by Joe Eisenberg, draws together many of her works of art from the past four decades.
