Late last year, when choosing works to illustrate a new history of linocuts [forthcoming September 2026], I revisited a print by the Australian artist G.W. Bot (aka Christine Grishin) which the V&A had acquired in 1997 -Poetry of a Drought, a linocut with chine collé. Seeing it again I was struck by two things. At first sight it confounded my expectations of what a linocut looks like - the dense network of fine thread-like lines which anchor the headless figure to the ground seemed too delicate to be the product of lino-cutting. And the imagery - inspired in part by the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries made around 1500 and now in the Cluny Museum, Paris - appeared rich in ambiguous metaphors relating to motherhood, as well as a physical and spiritual connection to the landscape, features of which are hinted at in a palimpsest of shadowy marks.
Intrigued by the making and the meaning of this print, I was prompted to explore Bot's work further, and in particular, to interrogate the thinking behind her choice of linocut as her primary print medium. In a symposium paper delivered in Canberra in 2001, Bot explained that she found linocut to be liberating because 'it does not carry with it the crushing dead hand of tradition.
