IN CONVERSATION WITH G.W. BOT
G.W. Bot is the artist’s name for the leading Australian artist Christine Grishin, who has been practicing as a full-time artist for more than 30 years. G.W. Bot is a printmaker, painter, sculptor and graphic artist who has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally. She has had held over 50 solo exhibitions, including shows in Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, London, Paris, New York and Los Angeles. She has participated in over 200 group and invitational exhibitions. She is the recipient of numerous commissions and has been awarded residencies in Europe, Asia and Australia.
During the recent COVID-19 lockdown, G.W. Bot kindly took some time out to answer a few questions about her practice and how she sees the world at the moment.
What would you most like people to know about your Arts practice?
Art matters – art is a voice that reaches out to others so that they can see the world again as if for the first time. Like a child who sees the moon and is so overcome that they need to share the experience with others just in case we hadn’t ever seen the moon. In surreal times – like this COVID-19 pandemic – we all perhaps need to hear the voice of the child/artist for inspiration, for hope, for sanity and survival.
Do you have an Artist Statement?
My studio is in the grasslands, west of Canberra, above the Murrumbidgee River, in a place called Strathnairn. I have been living and working in this Canberra environment for decades. At first, I noticed forms that lie on and under the grasslands – now, I am noticing the grasses themselves – a myriad of different languages that whisper and dance in every direction. I have devised a type of alphabet, or language, a system of marks that have been drawn from literally many thousands of quick sketches that I have made in the landscape. These markings I have called Glyphs. I identify with these Glyphs and see them as a metaphor for us – nations of Glyphs. A note of urgency is evident in the more recent work as this natural environment is increasingly under threat.
Are you working on anything right now?
At the moment I am working on an artist’s book with the text by the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova – her Requiem. The type is being set by my publisher, Nicholas Pounder of Polar Bear Press in Sydney, and I am providing 14 linocuts to this 56-page publication that is being produced in an edition of about 35. While the poem Requiem has its own setting, I find it relevant to the grasslands I have been working with for decades. These grasslands are unique and are under threat from ever increasing urban development, drought, fires and extremes of climate change. My linocuts will be a Requiem for a landscape we are destroying and all the creatures who dwell on and in and above its diminishing existence.
One way of looking at COVID-19 is that Mother Nature is fighting back. She is demanding that the human world stops and listens and looks again to what is really important in this life.
Where and how can people find you?
My work is available from the Beaver Galleries in Canberra and the Australian Galleries in Melbourne and Sydney. Other galleries handle my work overseas. My website is https://www.gwbot.net
You can read more about G.W Bot and her career and achievements, over here in our Studio Holders section.
