Chrissie Grishin (b. 1954), printmaker, painter and sculptor, has spent decades building a visual language of the Australian landscape. Grishin exhibits under the name of G W Bot, derived from an eighteenth-century French reference to le grand Wam Bot and adopted in tribute to the wombat, her spirit creature. Having studied in London, Paris and Australia, she has worked full-time as an artist since 1985. Her elegant prints and sculptures are immediately recognisable by gaunt, squiggly forms she calls ‘glyphs’. These evoke dead trees, fence barbs, the tracks of insects, twigs and bark fragments, but also map human experience, resilience, language and the ineffable. She is based in Canberra, and its scratchy surrounding country is her constant inspiration, but her work is in the collections of the Albertina in Vienna, the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Fogg Museum of Fine Arts at Harvard University, the Museum of Modern Art in Osaka, Japan and the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. In Australia she is represented in the National Gallery of Australia, most state galleries, and regional, institutional and corporate collections. She exhibits regularly, locally and abroad.
Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Purchased with funds provided by Claudia Hyles 2012
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