Travelling can be liberating if we allow ourselves to be open to new experiences. It can be especially true for artists such as Anita McIntyre, whose ceramic practice explores the narrations of voyages in both the physical and spiritual realms. As the Greek Egyptian poet C. P. Cavafy suggests in his insightful and wise poem Ithaca, it is not the end of the journey that matters but it is what we see and experience along its way. We need to be able to distil the experience we have had – to pin it down and make the experience personally relevant. McIntyre's interwoven narratives and multilayered imagery that inform her simple porcelain forms carry the distillation of her journeys in Australia and abroad – both physical and spiritual.

McIntyre is a Canberra artist who studied at the Canberra School of Art in the 1970s. Apart from a brief time in Melbourne, she has continued to take a prominent role in the visual arts community in Canberra. In addition to being a very successful art practitioner in ceramics, she is a visiting fellow and lecturer in ceramics at the Australian National University.

The works in this exhibition reflect the artist's years of travel in outback Australia, particularly the Kimberley which she calls her "heart" country. It also includes several works from the Canberra region – her "home" country. These continuing narratives are interwoven with the visual impetus of new areas of exploration discovered on her trips to Cambodia and Thailand.

McIntyre has long been making ceramic boats in porcelain decorated with images and symbols taken from a visual and personal language she has developed over the years of her art practice. These boats seem fragile and too precarious to be carrying the weight of social expectation that we place upon them. We see them as symbols of exploration but also of invasion; of the despair of the refugee but also of the hope of new beginnings; of trade but also of plunder.

In the series Mekong boat with fishing basket nos. 1-3, these boats also have an economic and ecological significance. If you travel along the Mekong you soon become aware of the importance of the river and its river boats in the lives of the people that live along its banks. The empty basket the artist has placed in the open ceramic boat can be a symbol of daily disaster as well as a portent of what may come in future as the fish disappear from the river. These small ceramic boats decorated with coloured slips and printed images of fish are very evocative for those of us who have seen so many of these small craft on Asian waterways.

In addition to the Mekong fishing boats, there are two tile images from Angor Thom of an ancient Cham warship with its dragon prow and with many rowers. Other tiles, also inscribed with imagery from Cambodia, capture the immensity of the large Buddha-like heads carved into walls of vast blocks of stone, characteristic of Angkor Wat and its temple complexes.

There are also delicate porcelain boats from the Kimberley series filled with bones and shells. The surfaces of these boats are decorated with beautifully delineated sea creatures and Wandjina spirit figures derived from Kimberley rock art. McIntyre captures successfully the same immediacy and powerful ghostly appearance the Wandjina spirit figures have when you view them in situ painted by Aboriginal artists on rock walls in the Kimberley.

Relating to the fishing boats but also to the imagery of sea creatures from the Kimberley series are a number of attractive beakers, their surfaces enlivened with fish taken from the artist's sketchbook.

McIntyre has a sense of directness and lightness of touch when using these symbols. She treats images from other cultures in a sensitive way so that they still embody their authenticity. These images are enhanced with a variety of decorative techniques – lino print and screen printing, stamping, decals (coloured transfers), coloured slips, terra sigillata (a type of refined clay slip) – all of which are handled with great confidence and skill.

This is not an exhibition that clamours for attention. It is quiet and contemplative in mood. Spend some time travelling with the artist through her work and you will find that the journey has been worthwhile.