The mystery of what happened to Laperouse is one of the lasting legacies of the French age of exploration. It appears that he was shipwrecked in about 1788 in the Solomon Islands with the survivors possibly massacred by locals. I am always amused by the thought that a 16-year-old Corsican named Napoleon Bonaparte volunteered to travel on that voyage, but ultimately was not selected.

When Laperouse failed to return the French authorities in 1791 dispatched Bruni d'Entrecasteaux to search for him on a frigate, Recherche, plus a similar ship, Esperance. Needless to say neither Search nor Hope found any trace of the missing Frenchman, but this journey of exploration was heavily weighted in favour of scientists, astronomers and artists. The two artists on the journey were Chailly-Ely and Jean Piron; the former absconded at the Cape of Good Hope, while the latter became one of the earliest European artists to work in Australia and the most immediate reason for the present exhibition.

Piron's brief was to record "all the views of land and remarkable sites, the portraits of natives of different countries, their costumes, their ceremonies, their games, their edifices, their sea vessels, and all productions of the earth and the sea in the three kingdoms, if the drawings of these diverse objects appear to him useful to facilitate the comprehension of the descriptions which the savants will make".

The Canberra artist Nicola Dickson, long interested in the work of European naturalists in Australia, has dedicated this exhibition to Bruni d'Entrecasteaux's expedition to Tasmania in 1792-93 and the record by the expedition's naturalist Jacques-Julien Houtou de Labillardiere, illustrated by Piron, of the peninsula that bears his name, Recherche Bay and Bruny Island. In 2016, Dickson spent three weeks in Tasmania retracing the expedition's journey and in her show brings together Piron's drawings as reinterpreted by later engravers, her own impressions, as well as conventions of late 18th century European decorative arts.

There is a charm in Dickson's finely crafted, detailed studies in acrylic and oil on linen, where a contrast is drawn between the exceptional tactility in the rendering of the feathers and fur of the animals (many of which had been killed, stuffed and unconvincingly placed in settings) and the botanical specimens and the abstracting strategies employed for the backgrounds and the framing motifs. The Antipodean Garden becomes a fabled vignette in which fairies and gnomes should appear; Forty-spotted Pardalote and Richea dracophylla is a surreal wonderland and the playful Tasmanian devil is as unconvincing as any stuffed toy.

Dickson's Recherche Bay 1793 after Piron does take liberties with the original, as did Piron with his subject matter, and the engraver with the original watercolour drawings. There is something attractive in this idea of echoes and adaptations to different expectations of different eras.

Dickson's technique is growing increasingly accomplished and the formula that she has developed is attractive, but I would hope that the work could move just a little bit further, away from the bookish ideas, and could engage the imagination on a more creative level.