Artists, both mature and emerging, show form at Form

The work in Valerie Kirk's Past in the Present and the Future shows a mature and resolved aesthetic voice tempered with experience and conceptual and intellectual rigour.

The four artists in the Emerging Artist Support Scheme Exhibition are, on the other hand, very recent graduates from the ANU School of Art.

Christopher Burton graduated in 2014 and Clare Peters in 2015. Kirrily Humphries is currently an honours candidate in the painting workshop. The other artist, Octavio Garcia, was an exhibitor in the 2015 end-of-year exhibition at the School of Art.

These four artists were the recipients of an award sponsored by National Plumbing Services and Form Studio and Gallery and were selected because of the work they showed as part of the graduating students' exhibition.

Past in the Present and the Future is a quietly beautiful exhibition. There are 17 works variously described by the artist as "drawing, collage, natural dye", "drawing", "fabric, stitch, collage", "drawing and collage", "stitched silk, drawing and collage", "woven tapestry" and "drawing on indigo dyed paper".

The preceding indicate technical means and given that apart from the tapestry there are no titles, act as cues into beginning the process of viewing, absorbing and comprehending the artist's works.

The works in the exhibition are predicated on Kirk's visit to the remarkable Age of Fishes Museum Canowindra in the central west of New South Wales, about two hours' drive from Canberra.

The museum houses the remains of thousands of fish from the Devonian period, that finished about 360 million years ago. For the artist this site speaks of the contradictory yet concurrent states of permanence and impermanence that find expression in the existence of fossils. Their role as evidence is clear and essential for knowledge of our geological past.

Conversely they speak to us of the ephemeral nature of existence, of the passage of time (no matter how vast) and of how short-lived man's footprint is on earth. In their lithic guise, fossils stand as permanent pointers to the impermanence of all life.

This powerful tool for the artistic imagination was immediately grasped by Kirk and given expression through her refined technical and aesthetic language.

Kirk is primarily a textile artist and her understanding of her materials allows for deft conceptual and visual combinations, contrasts and elisions.

The device of layering is overtly present. The veils of fabric and paper (literally) interwoven with threads of various colours speak of the marine world of the Devonian fish. They also impart a layered atmosphere of floating space that subtly alludes to the massive passages of time that have elapsed between the world of the fossils and the world of the artist.

Kirk uses graphic elements (drawing) with suave dexterity, cutting into surfaces and implying a sense of movement and depth. This surface etching is a real symbol of how the experience of confronting the Canowindra fossils has etched itself into the artist's memory.

Kirk's pictorial devices are essentially simplistic but used with a sophisticated understanding of the expressive strengths of, for example, transparency and ambiguity, delineation and suggestion, qualities that carry possibilities of immanence.

This exhibition is a celebration of the artistic imagination and its necessity in opening us to a world that in reality is beyond our grasp.

In the EASS Exhibition the four selected artists each demonstrates a skilled understanding and control of their selected medium.

Chris Burton is for me the stand-out artist in this group. He presents six pencil drawings titled Control One, Two … Six, each measuring 56 x 38 centimetres.

Although the drawings are separately titled in their totality they constitute a single work that highlights the artist's dexterous control of the graphic line and consummate ability to concentrate the concatenation of marks into a powerful graphic entity.

Burton also understands the aesthetic presence that is the paper onto which he places his graphic marks. His clever use of white vertical "spaces" as seen in the first two of his drawings sees them simultaneously controlling and creating spatial flow and intimations of depth that propel the viewer through this seductively reductive and aesthetically resolved work.

Octavio Garcia's four experimental photographs pay homage to the Aztec heritage of Mexico.

Garcia uses images of Aztec gods in almost direct quotation from original sources. The complicated iconography and concomitant formal language provides a forceful central image in the four works.

The technical processes are named as "experimental photography" and "chemigram". I am not sure what the latter is and the former probably requires further explication for those interested.

What is presented is a surface whose technical pentimenti provide a marked contrast to the sharp delineation of the central motifs.

Each work is "framed" with a decorative edging that perhaps references traditional Mexican visual language. There is in these works a tentative, unresolved character that may be the result of the experimental nature of the processes used by the artist.

Glass is Clare Peter's chosen medium. She uses very simple yet highly effective forms sometimes enlivened with text or repetition of marks.

The text is inscribed with a delicately beautiful script and is sometimes layered through the body of the glass forms. Unfortunately the text is often illegible (or at least it was for me) and sometimes legible only from one viewpoint, thus negating the three-dimensionality of the objects.

I should also say that when I could read the text it was somewhat sentimental rather in the manner of a greeting card and at odds with the attractive sculptural severity of most of the work.

The four glass blades (cat's 11, 17, 18 & 19) were the most dynamic. Their graceful thrusts into the surrounding space combined with their gradated yet singular palettes imbue them with an energetic elegance and impressive presence. Peters is aware of the qualities of light in all her work and a sense of its redemptive power permeates the nine works displayed.

Kirrily Humphries' three paintings of unpeopled interiors are immediate and captivating in their visual eclat. They are small (the largest is 33 x 24 centimetres) yet the layering that is essential to their making creates an extraordinarily dense spatial depth.

The theme of the empty room is of course not new. Humphries imbues her interiors with an almost iconic presence. Just as the artist physically layers her heavily built-up surface, so she imbues the implied presence of the humans and their activities that happened within the space.

The artist is concerned with space(s) and our interaction with it. The dark palette may carry sinister overtones but it is an effective device to convey not only painterly chiaroscuro but also the shaded nuances of what has passed in the places/spaces depicted.

Past in the Present and the Future by Valerie Kirk. Emerging Artist Support Scheme Award Recipients' Exhibition by various artists.

Form Studio and Gallery, 1/30 Aurora Ave, Queanbeyan. Until March 28.