The Ainslie painter has, in her imagination and with adaptations of satellite pictures, gone aloft to look down on our city and our region. Her unorthodox, sometimes martian's eye views of the ACT's corner of planet Earth are on display in her unorthodox current exhibition ''Flying Over A Wobbly Line''.

Clambering into the saddle of one of my oldest hobby horses, your columnist preaches that when Canberra artists paint Canberra they can be a little fixated on our trees and parrots (and, inexplicably, on picturesque bark huts we don't really have). We are almost 100 years old and are an especially artist-infested little metropolis and yet as our centenary year looms there are zillions of Canberra places and Canberran foibles that Canberra artists have yet to tackle.

And so it is with rapture that one greets ''Flying Over A Wobbly Line''.

Wheatstone explains that what she calls her ''wobbly line'' is the ''wobbly ribbon'' of the Molonglo River as it appears from the air and as it's observed ''winding its way through Queanbeyan in NSW to Canberra in the ACT before meeting its big sister, the Murrumbidgee''.

''The exhibition is about looking down at the ACT and region from the air, focusing on the Molonglo River corridor and interpreting the patterns and marks on the land. The boundaries and features made by nature and humankind, roads, clearings, buildings and created boundaries, natural features, terrain and the traces of past usage, places and pathways. They're like wrinkles and scars on ageing skin.''

What this has meant is that she's painted unfashionable Canberra places, like for example Dairy Flat Road as it wanders out to cruelly-ignored-by-artists Fyshwick and through the manicured meadows of the Canturf company, never painted before. She's paid attention to quarries at Pialligo and to a field of grapevines at Holt.

She is, surely, the first painter of Canberra to look at the city and its place in this way and is also, surely, with her ''Glenloch Gridlock'' (acrylic and mixed media on canvas) the first Canberran to paint a Canberra traffic snarl even though driving in sometimes ensnarled traffic is not such a common Canberra experience. ''I've enjoyed looking at everyday life, at what people do, and giving it a twist.''

She says that long before she soared aloft like this in her imagination she was already always ''looking out of aeroplane windows, seeing patterns in the landscape'' and taking photographs through those windows as she winged in and out of the city.

''Flying Over A Wobbly Line'' is at the characterful M16 Artspace space at 21 Blaxland Crescent, Griffith. This is it's last weekend. If you wobble along to it this Sunday between noon and five Wheatstone is the artist you will meet in M16's ''meet the artist'' program.