Water: Land: Sky. By Debra Jurss and Ruth le Cheminant. Form Studio and Gallery, 1/30 Aurora Avenue, Queanbeyan. Until August 2.

These artists look at very different landscapes. Jurss takes as her starting point the coastal topography of Antarctica, while le Cheminant explores the country around her home in the Blue Mountains and beyond. Jurss, who works in glass, has adopted a simple formal presentation – rectangular panels. This format allied with the purposefully limited palette (essentially whites and blues) results in a form of concentrated minimalism, a visual simplicity that belies the complexities of the landscapes depicted. Jurss' works are small – the largest is 29 x 70 x 1cm – but she is still able to imbue them with the expansive stillness of the Antarctic. She is obviously familiar with her subject and has captured its dramatic vistas with acuity and understanding.

She uses bands of colour (whites, blues) very effectively, overlaying and overlapping them to intimate underlying forms and the infinite sweep of the icebound land. The bands have a gestural almost painterly quality and this, allied to their role in indicating the hidden topographies of the Antarctic landscape, removes them from the purely decorative. They are simultaneously surface and form. The best works, Landscape # 7 and Micro # 16, offer an astute use of a range of blues, the darker tones providing particularly effective contrasts whilst simultaneously adding to the feeling of the immensity of the places depicted. Jurss' art as exemplified here is indicative rather than descriptive. It speaks of her experience of place in an ostensibly simple but formally complex visual language that captures the quiet stillness of the Antarctic. The use of the same motifs and similar pictorial devices needs to be carefully edited to avoid repetition. She avoids that but…just.

Ruth le Cheminant's work is full of colour and vivacity. Her (mostly) high-toned palette is full of gestural marks, swathes and planes of colour and lots of visual activity. She approaches her motif as a colourist and interprets that motif in an essentially abstract language. In most works there is a tendency for colour to dominate to the extent that underlying structure is barely intimated let alone described or delineated. However, the freneticism of the surface activity has some attraction but often the relationship to the purported landscape that is the thematic choice is lost.

Le Cheminant's best work is Burnt tree stumps, Hill End. It is also the largest of her works measuring 100 x 140 cm. The palette of blacks, browns and white stands in stark contrast to the acid greens, lemons, blues, and etcetera of the other works. There is much painterly activity but it is controlled or at least contained by the large areas of black and brown and the simple but highly effective inclusion of the straggly black line of the horizon. Within her pictorial vocabulary the artist has included areas of wash, drips and particularly conspicuous unpainted areas of the beautifully textured paper on which the work is made. These in combination offer positive additions to the ambient effect of this work, an effect that captures the spare beauty of the aftermath of fire.

In Land; Sky le Cheminant adopts an aerial view. The sky is denoted by the word "SKY" in white, and sitting towards the top of the canvas. The land is similarly nominated ("LAND") but in black, and towards the bottom of the picture. These verbal cues are individualised not only by their colour but also by their placement, the latter creating for the viewer in an overt way the deep expanse of the landscape that sits between the "LAND" and the "SKY". The artist's landscape is again about the activity of painting but it is also concerned with the details of the topography depicted (in the artist's acid palette). This work is clever and the use of words in company with the vigorously applied paint softens what in other works is too much surface and not enough depth.

In There's a lot of red in the landscape # 17 words are replaced by slashes of red paint inserted across the surface. These act as both "controllers" of the once again very active surface, and as indicators of the forms of the landscape that the artist is ostensibly depicting. Minimal insertions such as these might be a formal device that the artist could use to contain and to provide structure for her joyful pictorial expressions.