G.W. Bot – ‘A Conspicuous Object – The Maitland Hospital’, Maitland Regional Art Gallery

In News November 4, 2021

Image: G.W. Bot’s artworks installed in the exhibition, A Conspicuous Object – The Maitland Hospital. Photograph: Clare Hodgins.

Artist G.W. Bot is exhibiting as part of A Conspicuous Object – The Maitland Hospital at Maitland Regional Art Gallery, curated by Joe Eisenberg and Janis Wilton.

About the exhibition

Built on Wonnarua land, The Maitland Hospital is a layered place. Ancient songlines are overwritten by a patchwork of buildings from across 170 years. Corridors are imbued with the fears and hopes of large numbers of people. The smells and sounds of medical care and treatments are ever present. There are good and bad memories. There are funny and sad stories.

A Conspicuous Object – The Maitland Hospital taps into these layers. Ten artists were invited to respond to stories about the hospital to capture the diversity of experiences, people and places of the Hospital. The exhibition will present both familiar and unfamiliar moments, invite reflection, offer challenges, and evoke the complex and layered nature of this object that has peered across Maitland since the 1840s. The exhibition will also highlight the ways art, history and health can intertwine to tell stories, offer distraction and engage community memories.

Artists include: G.W. Bot, Linda Greedy, Oliver Harlan, Anita Johnson, Adrian Lockhart, Catharine Neilson, Susan O’Doherty, Peter O’Doherty, Peter Poulet and Lesley Salem.

A Conspicuous Object is presented in partnership with Hunter New England Local Health District and Health Infrastructure.

G. W. Bot’s work for ‘A Conspicuous Object – The Maitland Hospital’

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 she was invited to use this language to create artworks that evoke the gardens and grounds of the old Maitland Hospital.

Exhibition details:
16 October 2021 – 6 February 2022
Maitland Regional Art Gallery

For more information about the exhibition visit the companion website, aconspicuousobject.com.au