It all takes place in the garden.
Artist G. W. Bot has an aesthetic visual language that talks with, and responds to, natural environments. As she explains:
My artistic language that I call ‘Glyphs’ consists of scribblings of nature that I have transposed, gathered and interpreted. It is not a figurative language. In other words, do not look for the figure of an actual gardener or sun. It is an allegorical and symbolic language that is open to many different personal and universal levels of interpretation.
For the exhibition, A Conspicuous Object - The Maitland Hospital, she was invited to use this language to create artworks that evoke the gardens and grounds of the old Maitland Hospital.
G.W. Bot’s artworks installed in the exhibition, A Conspicuous Object - The Maitland Hospital, Maitland Regional Art Gallery, October 2021.
(Clare Hodgins)
“I have engaged with the stories and images of the gardens that have surrounded the Maitland Hospital since its establishment in the 1840s. Like the hospital itself, the gardens have flourished at times and, at other times, have fallen into neglect. They have also been places that can nourish patients – and others – both physically and spiritually: gardens full of flowers and grasses and herbs, fruit and vegetables; of fresh air and sunlight, trees, bees and birdsong. They are places of hope, scents and perfumes, of beauty and contemplation. They are a celebration of life itself.
I also see the ways in which gardens symbolize many things to all cultures and how the garden is, in essence, the earth itself, a place we all enter when we are born and one that offers different pathways to follow as we leave.”
The gardener
2021
bronze
96 x 44 x 3 cm
A garden needs a gardener in the same way that a medical doctor is needed to tend to the medical care of patients. This gardener can also be viewed as a portrait of the sun, the heavenly body that is the giver of light and warmth.
Glyphs - the verandah
2021
bronze
126 x 51 x 3 cm
Glyphs – The Verandah was inspired by the wrought iron verandah in one of the oldest buildings in the hospital: I imagined what it might be like standing on the verandah, with shuttered blinds against the summer sun, looking out onto the garden below. In part of the garden there is a tree of life, a symbol of life and hope for the future, as well as reaching beyond the gardens to another reality.
Sun glyph (detail)
2021
stone sundial, steel and bronze
variable
At the centre of Sun Glyph lies the top of the sundial that used to cast its shadow in the hospital gardens and that has seen better days. In its broken form the sundial rests on a pedestal covered in sand with sun rays of bronze and steel radiating from it. A dying sun.
Left: …the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, 2021, linocut on tapa cloth and Magnani paper 99 x 53, (irregular)
Right: Celestial Poet, 2021, linocut on tapa cloth and Korean Hanji paper, 133.5 x 63 cm (irregular)
The two linocuts above have been printed by me, the artist, in my Canberra studio, BB Press. I have used tapa cloth and Korean Hanji paper. The tapa comes from Tonga and there it is used as a rite of passage in itself: when you are born you are wrapped in tapa and so too when you die. The Korean Hanji is a handmade mulberry paper. This paper, a celestial blue, was chosen specifically to suggest the sky, the beyond – another reality.
“In summation, ‘A Conspicuous Object’, for me, is an exhibition about a place that was born, is dying, and is being resurrected elsewhere. It is an exhibition of a rite of passage.”
G.W. Bot’s Celestial Poet was purchased by NSW Health Infrastructure, and now hangs in the waiting room next to the hospital mortuary.
First posted, 16 October 2021
Updated, 11 April 2022