The Canberra Museum and Gallery MAG exhibition in March, Celebration: Twenty Years of Collecting Visual Art, curated by Deborah Clark, was like a walk back through all the memorable exhibitions I had seen over the past 20 years.

I was really impressed with the choice of objects and visual art since CMAG started collecting in 1996. The exhibition not only represented the best and most characteristic of each artist’s practice (the list of artists included in this representative exhibition of the CMAG collection is very impressive) but also represented a generous representation of all visual art forms.

The collection includes gifted works and works bought by the gallery. How fortunate that we now have Alison Jackson’s 2015 work Ten vessels, 10 days, a beautiful study in time and making – and how pleased I was to see that the Alphabet was purchased in its entirety. This small work, first exhibited at Craft ACT in 2012, is made up of 26 letters in glass. Each letter is made by a well-known glass artist (including Klaus Moje, Kirstie Rea, Tom Rowney and Mel Douglas) and provides a unique work that marks a particular time and place.

Another CMAG exhibition worthy of note that continued into 2018 was about the career of Eirene Mort (1879-1977) - a fascinating study of the life of an important woman artist and teacher who brought her knowledge of the English arts and craft movement to Sydney and later to the Canberra region.

Clay Stories at Strathnairn Arts in May was a travelling exhibition from the Sabbia Gallery and the Remote Communities Ceramic Network that brought together ceramic artists from several community art centres.

Ceramics are not a traditional Indigenous art form but Indigenous artists are certainly moving with confidence into this area. The wool shed at Strathnairn provided a very sympathetic venue for this large exhibition. Most of us are familiar with the colourful ceramics from Twi Design and Hermannsburg Potters. However, what was a revelation were the graceful linear designs by Ernabella artists and the bagu forms based on firesticks from Girringun Aboriginal Art Centre. It is near impossible to pick out any one artist from Ernabella Arts but Rupert Jack’s free-flowing linear designs had an assurance and poetic sensitivity that was outstanding amongst this assured group of ceramic artists.

Hiroe Swen’s ceramic exhibition Fifty Flights of Fancy at Watson Art Centre in November provided a wonderful example of Swen’s continuing energy and creativity in her 84th year. Swen was born in Japan in 1938 and the exhibition celebrated the artist’s 50 years in Australia as well as 61 years working at her craft. Her 50 beautiful open necked vessels were decorated with lyrical images of birds either in flight or seeking shelter in the canopy of trees. Swen is a master of applying her designs to three-dimensional forms so that both positive and negative spaces are integrated and are of equal value in the artist’s creation of images of poetic sensibility.

Helen Aitken-Kuhnen was joined by her daughter, fellow artist Mio Kuhnen, in their joint exhibition of jewellery Transfer at the Bilk Gallery in October. This exhibition was a tour de force by Aitken-Kuhnen, who must be one of Australia’s leading exponents of using the complex art of enamelling on metal in contemporary jewellery. Both artists have attended workshops with Japanese master of enamelling Tsuruya Sakurai. Drawn from her studies in enamelling techniques Aitken-Kuhnen uses more complex techniques of cloisonné for her visually rich and colourful collection of brooches and pendants with abstracted images inspired by the artist’s profound response to the Australian landscape. Kuhnen’s inspiration is also related to landscape, to the contours of the land and river basins. She is able to distil the essence of the immensity of this concept into images for jewellery. In this exhibition she turned to the more remote exotic landscapes of the Amazon basin and its colourful moths for her series of engraved and enamelled brooches and pendants. A selection of her silver etchings on metal was accompanied by covetable delicate prints on paper of her designs.

And as my fifth choice I cannot omit the truly breathtaking exhibition Western Desert Sublime - a collection of paintings donated to the Australian National University by Craig Edwards at the ANU Drill Hall Gallery in October. There was nothing small in size or concept about these works by such outstanding Indigenous artists – not from the urban environment but from the open spaces of the Western Desert. These paintings provide vast visual fields of colour and mark-making that are spectacular. They sing songs of the Dreamtime informed by the artist’s Indigenous heritage and ancestral country. In demonstrating such visual sensitivity they speak to us through breathtaking vistas of other dimensions of time and space. To stand in front of these powerful and assured works was a truly humbling and enriching experience.