Exposition monographique consacrée à l’artiste australienne GW BOT | GLYPHMAKER - La métamorphose des signes

The gallery Arts d’Australie • Stéphane Jacob presents GW BOT | GLYPHMAKER — La métamorphose des signes, a monographic exhibition devoted to Australian artist GW Bot, from 15 October 2026 to 23 January 2027, at 13 rue Chapon, 75003 Paris. Through her work, GW Bot develops a singular language of signs and glyphs, inspired by the textures, rhythms, light and atmosphere of the Australian landscape. Between writing and abstraction, her forms express an intimate relationship with the territory, where nature becomes at once memory, language and inner space.

Born in 1954 in Quetta, Pakistan, to Australian parents, GW Bot is an Australian artist whose work explores the connections between the human being, the landscape and the inner world. Her childhood, spent in several countries, nurtured an early interest in cultures and territories. She studied art in London, Paris and Australia, and received her diploma from the Australian National University in Canberra in 1982. Since 1985, she has devoted herself fully to her artistic practice. Based in Canberra, at the heart of an environment that became the major source of her inspiration, she adopted the wombat as her totem animal, in reference to the sense of unity between human beings and their environment found in certain Aboriginal traditions. She forged her artist’s name from one of the earliest written references to the wombat in a French source: “le Grand Wam Bot”.

Foreword to the exhibition

Through her works, GW Bot develops a singular visual language based on “glyphs”, signs she invents and transforms through contact with Australian landscapes. A glyph is a graphic sign that carries both a form and a meaning. Halfway between plant, animal and human forms, these signs constitute an open alphabet whose meaning deliberately remains mysterious. The artist does not seek to represent nature realistically. Rather, she translates its rhythms, forces and transformations. Forests, meadows, cliffs, burnt lands and arid landscapes thus become the sources of a personal form of writing. Her universe was also shaped over many journeys in Europe and the Middle East. Byzantine art, the sculptures of Aghtamar, the motifs of Oriental carpets, and even The Lady and the Unicorn have nourished her imagination and enriched her vocabulary of forms and symbols.