Hamlet's pronouncement: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy" has been traditionally taken to mean that rational thought can explain only a fraction of what exists or can exist.

The exhibition Mutable Realities brings together four artists who look at art's ability to transform the seen reality and evoke an alternative reality that is frequently overlooked. Patsy Payne, who taught printmaking at the ANU School of Art for many years until recently, has long been obsessed with the body as the constant reality in our being. It is one on which life is inscribed and something that can transcend its materiality and ascend to the realm of dreams and fantasies. Through art, the physical and the spiritual can be brought together and the two states of being can be reconciled within the art object.

In this exhibition, her 15 exhibits bring together many mediums, including tapestry weaving, drawing, collages and laser cut acrylic shapes. Throughout, the constant theme is the whimsical play between uncertain states of being, like the dictate of "shadow know your place!"

Peter Jordan exhibits 15 of his acrylic paintings with an illustrative and expressionist intent, quoting as his epigraph "life is but a dream". The paintings are spirited, but somewhat unresolved.

Trish Roan creates enigmatic objects which in some ways question the blurred boundaries between animals and humans. These include recordings of the noises made by various bat species, which you are invited to listen to on a vinyl recording, where you can control the speed by turning the handle of the gramophone. Her most intriguing object is termed 800,000,000 heartbeats, where an ingenious machine reflects this strange figure. She explains that the artist Mark Zirpel once said that in the course of their lives, all mammals had about 800 million heartbeats, with mice having a very fast beating heart for the duration of their short lives, while whales had a heart rate of five or six beats a minute for the course of their very long lives. I would love a fact check on this pronouncement, but there is a certain eeriness about it, if true.

Sara Freeman is a master of slow art – painstakingly slow to make with a gesso ground, wax and egg tempera and countless incisions – and requiring slow meditation for its viewing. Her Open Sky (2016) painting was made as a meditation after watching a friend die of cancer. She observes "There are approximately 26,000 lines incised in the wax, which is about how many breaths we breathe in a day, and also how many days we would live in a life of 71 years." Her Emerging II (2016) is the most powerful of her 18 pieces in the show, profoundly moving, subtle and a wonderful meditative experience.

It is inevitable that an exhibition of this nature is a mixed bag but, as a whole, it celebrates the alchemy of art – not only in its ability to transform reality, but also to reveal in reality truths more profound than those that are visible to the rational eye.