Australglyphs: G.W. Bot

The Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery is pleased to present Australglyphs, an exhibition of works by Australian artist G.W. Bot, whose practice explores humanity’s profound connection with the natural world through a distinctive visual language.

Central to Bot’s practice is her language of ‘glyphs’ — elemental visual forms distilled from thousands of sketches of trees, rocks, plants, waterways and other features of the landscape. Together, these marks form a personal lexicon through which Bot evokes the particular character of the natural world. Each work becomes a kind of portrait of the landscape: a visual poem that celebrates life while inviting contemplation of our place within it.

Australglyphs brings together paintings, prints, linocuts and sculptures spanning Bot’s practice. Linocut has remained her primary medium for decades, and one through which she has developed an extraordinarily expressive range of mark-making. Bot values the medium for its directness and immediacy: its capacity to pare an image back to its essential elements, a process she has likened to writing a poem rather than a novel. The physical process of cutting into lino also reflects her close connection to the earth. She has described linocutting as being ‘like working with the surface of the earth’ — an apt comparison for a process in which sharp tools carve into and excavate the pliable surface of the lino. Bot maintains close control over the printmaking process, printing most of her linocuts herself on an etching press in her home studio.

Throughout the exhibition, references to the physical landscape shift between the recognisable and the abstract. In some works, expanses of pigment are crossed by fragmented marks that suggest the passage of humans or animals across the land. Elsewhere, including in Bot’s bronze wall sculptures, her glyphs take on a calligraphic quality, recalling musical notation, written symbols or embroidery stitches.

The works on view also demonstrate Bot’s sensitivity to material and surface. She works across a variety of media and supports, from delicate Magnani and mulberry papers to tapa cloth, traditionally made from beaten tree bark, as well as bronze, which takes the form of wall-based reliefs and animal sculptures. These materials introduce their own textures and irregularities, extending the physical relationship between image and landscape that runs throughout her practice.

Across these varied materials and forms, Bot’s work reflects upon the fundamental interdependence of human life and the natural world. Australglyphs presents the landscape not simply as something to be observed, but as a living world with which humans are intimately connected, reminding us of the importance of recognising and sustaining that connection.