The American-born, Mongarlowe-based artist Gail Nichols has over several decades built up a national and international reputation as a ceramic artist with her unusual soda vapour glazed stoneware.

They are remarkably sexy, sensuous pots with soft bubbly organic surfaces, which in their shapes play with closed and open forms. Nichols writes of her philosophy as a potter, “I make generously rounded, eccentric vessels, thrown and manipulated, with lush dimpled surfaces inviting tactile as well as visual responses. The surfaces on these vessels have evolved through years of technical research with soda glazing – development of materials and processes, and investigation of glaze microstructure. The research was done to satisfy a curiosity that was largely aesthetic: a desire to work directly with clay and fire, and to achieve close integration of form and surface.”

The Drill Hall exhibition, curated by Karen O’Clery, includes 15 of her remarkable pots, each with an evocative title drawn from the surrounding landscape at the foot of Mount Budawang near Braidwood. They are quite large pots – for example Stormwatch, 2014, measures 36 by 41 by 41 centimetres – and combine the quality of atmospheric space, swirling masses of colour and a textured surface like snow that has been pitted by a hailstorm. The more you are absorbed by the surfaces, the more it becomes an exploration of the unexpected. Not only beautiful objects, they also possess a transcendental quality that transports you into a realm of nature that is touched with the sublime.

The most unusual aspect of this exhibition is not the glazed stoneware that we associate with this artist, but her textiles. Gail Nichols was introduced to rug making by her friend Maggie Hickey and gradually was seduced by rug hooking into which she translated the tactile surfaces of her stoneware. On visiting Arthur Boyd’s The Agony and The Ecstasy exhibition at the National Gallery, curated by Dr Deborah Hart, Nichols was mesmerised by Boyd’s tapestries that had been woven for him in Portugal. This opened for Nichols both the formal and technical possibilities of fibre art and in her own and unusual manner she started to create landscape imagery in rugs.

The seven textile pieces at the exhibition pulsate with the excitement of an artist entering a new wonderland – not as a novice, but as a veteran of three decades standing. Compared with her pots, the process of rug hooking allows for a more direct and more literal response to nature as she sculpts with fabrics. Technically, Nichols employs strips of fabric, both new and recycled, hooked into a woven hessian backing. There is vibrancy in her palette and richly textured surfaces.

Some of the rugs, including Temple fish, 2017, inspired by a pool filled with multi-coloured koi carp encountered in a temple in Bali, are striking in their kinetic design. In others, ambition exceeds the artist’s technical toolbox.

Gail Nichols' In transit is an exciting exhibition where an artist with a major established reputation leaps joyously and heroically into a new medium.