Ruth Waller: Vegetable, mineral … paintings and ceramics at Nancy Sever Gallery

One feature of a Ruth Waller show is that every exhibition is a surprise – huge animal paw prints, renaissance-style predella panels, rocks and shrubs and now the "green and glitter" show.

Waller, as an artist, thematically jumps around and responds to whatever surrounds her. In her previous exhibition at this gallery, in 2014, she was responding to the rocks and plants at her place in the Blue Mountains, the Botanical Gardens in Canberra, as well as memories of art and music. In the present exhibition, she is responding to the three months that she spent on the island of Suomenlinna in Finland, then living in Penland in North Carolina and later experimenting with ceramics at the school of art in Canberra, where she has worked full-time in the painting workshop since 1990. To borrow a phrase from the artist in her notes to this show, the "exhibition samples work … made from 2015 to the present".

The exhibition does have this quality of what the Americans call a "sampler of assorted chocolates" with very, very lush green paintings from Finland, slightly less lush green collages, many on corrugated cardboard, from America, and small green ceramic planters, some with soil and plants, with lovely glazes made by the former head of the ceramics workshop, the master potter and glaze maker, Greg Daly. If one thing unifies this show, it is the colour green, the colour many artists avoid and many art dealers say makes it difficult to attract an audience.

In what is likely the most famous essay ever written on the theory of art, Wassily Kandinsky's "Concerning the spiritual in art" (1912), the sage artist observes the impact of the colour green: "The effect on the soul through the eye is therefore motionless. This is a fact recognised not only by opticians, but by the world. Green is the most restful colour that exists. On exhausted men this restfulness has a beneficial effect, but after a time it becomes wearisome. Pictures painted in shades of green are passive and tend to be wearisome; this contrasts with the active warmth of yellow or the active coolness of blue. In the hierarchy of colours green is the 'bourgeoisie' – self-satisfied, immovable, narrow. It is the colour of summer, the period when nature is resting from the storms of winter and the productive energy of spring."

Waller is conscious of this prejudice against the colour green and observes that "green is an inherently difficult colour for painters – [and] that no one wants green paintings". She dilutes her greens and varies the surfaces on which the colours are applied, but in some ways the passivity of the colour prevails and individual paintings work better than a whole wall of them. Finnish artist Ellen Thesleff, when confronting the greens of her native country, as in her Muroleelta landscapes, created a sonorous inner luminosity that made the green glow from within and burst with fecundity. Otherwise, as in the immortal words of Kandinsky, "Green is like a fat, very healthy cow lying still and unmoving, only capable of chewing the cud, regarding the world with stupid dull eyes".

The highlights of this exhibition are the small, loose sketches from America and the pots and, never having seen any of Waller's pots before, they come as a revelation with their quirky structures and beautiful luminous glazes. Hopefully this is the first of Waller's "green phase" and further resolutions lie ahead of her.