Visual Arts / Portrait of a landscape, GW Bot. At Belco Arts, until July 6. Reviewed by KERRY-ANNE COUSINS

GW Bot’s works can be likened to earth songs.

A celebrated Canberra artist, this exhibition is a beautifully curated collection of her works from the past four decades. They are not arranged chronologically but sited in selected groupings so that related ideas, themes and images can pass eloquently between them.

The majority of these works reflect the landscapes of the Canberra region – the grasslands, the mountains and the expansive waters of Weereewa (Lake George).  Other works track the artist’s wanderings through Cornwall, France and Austria.

How do we develop a visual language, a way of communicating our singular vision of how we see and experience of our landscape?

The artist has conceived an eloquent way to express what she wishes to say through her use of signs, marks and symbols that she calls glyphs. Several other works refer to written texts such as in Verso 1,11 and 111 and signify the artist noting the importance of a form of language to narrate a story. Derived from the marks made in the landscape, the dead trees, their twigs and branches, the shapes of rivers and mountains and the life cycles of nature, her glyphs have become an eloquent form of expression and communication.

In a work entitled A Traveller’s Tale, the pieces of old barbed wire on a fence left to vibrate in the wind signify the tales left by past travellers and, in Glyphs-Earth, the marks come from scribbles found on eucalyptus bark made by insects.

Other images place our human presence in this landscape… the poet who creates the songs we sing, the pilgrim who journeys through the land on a spiritual quest and the nurturing symbol of mother and child. The Lady and the Unicorn, a 15^th century image centred in the hortus conclusus (the enclosed garden) is also part of this company of symbolic figures – an image from the artist’s earlier work used to suggest our attempt to contain nature.

The textures of tapa cloth and mulberry paper, the rich earth colours and sky blues locate the works in the landscape. Mark-making, whether it is the striking black image of a dead tree at Weereewa in the work called Charon or the densely rendered trunks of burnt trees In Site 11, delineates the artist’s vision.

The movement of clouds and sky are eloquently expressed in Rhapsody where clouds scurry across a dark sky. The artist journeys across the land, noting its different moods and its structure delineated by light and shadows. In Glyph – the Journey, her route is defined by a red line across the landscape – a route bound by man-made tracks and roads. Yet in another work, Journey through a Landscape, she is also conscious of the original inhabitants of the land whose journeys had a different purpose and sense of time.

GW Bot is linked to these ancient wayfarers through her own visual experiences that she recounts in these singular, poetic and deeply moving works.