Monographic exhibition dedicated to Australian artist GW BOT | GLYPHMAKER - The Metamorphosis of Signs

Born in 1954 in Quetta, Pakistan, to Australian parents, GW Bot is an Australian artist whose work explores the connections between human beings, landscape, and the inner world. Her childhood spent in several countries early on nurtured her interest in cultures and territories. She studied art in London, Paris, and Australia, and graduated from the Australian National University in Canberra in 1982. Since 1985, she has dedicated herself fully to her artistic practice. Based in Canberra, at the heart of an environment that became the major source of her inspiration, she adopted the wombat as her totemic animal, in reference to the relationship of unity between human beings and their environment found in certain Aboriginal traditions. She forged her artist name from one of the first written references to the wombat in a French source: "le Grand Wam Bot".

Foreword to the exhibition

Through her works, GW Bot develops a singular visual language based on "glyphs," signs that she invents and transforms through contact with the Australian landscapes. A glyph is a graphic sign that carries within it both a form and a meaning. Midway between plant, animal, and human forms, these signs constitute an open alphabet, whose meaning remains intentionally mysterious.

The artist does not seek to represent nature in a realistic way. Instead, she translates its rhythms, forces, and transformations. Forests, grasslands, cliffs, burnt lands, or arid landscapes thus become the sources of a personal writing.

Her universe was also built over the course of numerous travels in Europe and the Middle East. Byzantine art, the sculptures of Aghtamar, oriental carpet patterns, and even The Lady and the Unicorn have nurtured her imagination and enriched her vocabulary of forms and symbols. Literature and poetry, particularly the work of Alexander Pushkin, also accompany her reflection on creation and the figure of the poet.

Gradually, her work shifted toward the theme of the garden. It became a space that is both external and internal, where nature, intimacy, and spirituality meet. Drawing inspiration in particular from the tradition of the hortus conclusus and religious representations, GW Bot makes the garden a place of contemplation and a passage between the visible and the invisible. This attention paid to the garden can, in some respects, evoke that of Bonnard, for whom this space also became a sensitive and pictorial territory.

All these influences mingle in a body of work deeply rooted in the Australian territory and attentive to its fragility. Fire, drought, disappearance, and rebirth become expressions of the cycles that permeate the living world.

The "black sun," a recurring motif in her work, introduces a dimension that is both cosmic and symbolic. It evokes the relationships between darkness and light, disappearance and rebirth, and accompanies the idea of transformation.

Linocut, pigments, graphite, cut-outs, and tapa contribute to this visual writing made of imprints, superimpositions, and transparencies. The choice of paper also occupies an essential place in her creative process. GW Bot considers it a true "ground": its texture, density, and ability to receive the image directly influence the result. Each paper thus possesses its own qualities and, like a ground, can welcome certain forms and transform others.

The work of GW Bot thus composes a true poetic cartography, in which landscape, memory, spirituality, and language meet and constantly transform.