G. W. Bot

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G. W. Bot is the signature name of Australian artist Christine Grishin, born Christine Falkland in 1954 in Quetta, Pakistan. She has been a full-time artist for more than 30 years, working as a printmaker, sculptor, painter and graphic artist. Since 1985 her main focus has been linocut printing, using her own shapes and glyphs to represent landscapes she loves. She has had about 50 solo exhibitions and more than 200 group shows. Her work is held in more than 100 collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, the MoMA Osaka and the Fogg Museum at Harvard.

Bot studied art in London, Paris and Australia and graduated from the Australian National University in 1982. She has had residencies at Bundanon and Riversdale in New South Wales. She lives in Canberra with a Strathnairn Arts Association studio in Holt, ACT, surrounded by gardens and bushland that inspire her work.

Like many artists who are mothers, she felt isolation when her children were young. Linocuts let her work on a kitchen table and grow her skills during that time. She loves poetry and draws on it for much of her art. She chose the name G. W. Bot as a totem; wombats on her property helped inspire it, and the name comes from a French explorer’s note about the animal.

Bot works in many media—gouache, watercolour, oils, tempera, intaglio, lithography and relief printing—but linocut remains central. She has said the linocut is an adventurous, uncodified medium that can capture the delicate and dramatic tones of the landscape. In the 1980s her work was figurative, but in the 1990s she started to develop glyphs that express the metaphysical and spiritual side of the landscape, often using layering and sometimes collage or textiles.

Her glyphs are a system of marks, a language of natural elements. They are known for strong silhouettes, natural colors, rich texture and rhythmic patterns. Rover Thomas’s use of black in the Australian landscape influenced her view of color; she sees black as a sign of regeneration after fire.

From 2013 she began sculpting glyphs in steel, creating works such as Treaty Glyphs and Glyphs – Between Worlds. The steel pieces are made from plain carbon steel, cut and smoothed, rusted to a ruby-brown color, and bolted to a backing to cast their shadows.

During the COVID-19 pandemic she spoke about art’s importance: art matters because it gives people a way to see the world anew and find hope and resilience.