Presence: Two Visions of Landscape is an exhibition curated by Peter Haynes which has travelled to the regional galleries of Orange and Goulburn before being shown at Form Gallery in Queanbeyan. The two artists – Claire Primrose, a painter and printmaker and Ros Auld who works in ceramics – share a vision of the landscape that results in works that sit sympathetically together.

While each artist has developed their own particular vision in the media in which they enjoy working, there are some works such as The Terrain series 1, 2, 4 where both artists have fruitfully collaborated. These very successful collaborative works are convincing because of the interest both artists have in developing a pictorial language that portrays a sense of landscape through colour, mark-making, and the creation of textural surfaces. Instead of a rather awkward hybrid, these collaborative works are unified visually yet remain true to the vision of each artist.

Claire Primrose has developed as a confident and assured artist. From her early interest in printmaking, Primrose has turned to painting the landscape of the mountains inspired by the majesty of the Snowy Mountains.

It is an interesting question as to how much the artist's interest in printmaking has influenced the way she applies paint. Layers of paint are built up and rubbed back to produce complex surface areas where colour appears to drift in diaphanous veils across the canvas. These layers of muted colour evoke the atmospheric moods of nature and are enlivened and energised by slashes of contrasting colour and tone.

In Memory-mapping 3, a striking orange band of colour lights the canvas from below. Although based on observation, the paintings and drawings are the result of later recollection and memory. Different techniques and processes are used and the artist is open to unexpected effects brought about by using a variety of techniques and processes. This is a important link with the work of Auld's ceramics where slips and glazes fired in the kiln can take on unexpected effects in the firing.

Accompanying the large paintings by Primrose are a series of her beautiful and sensitive images of mountain landscapes. Drawn from nature, the artist refines and manipulates these images in the studio. Whereas the paintings are more about the intangible atmospheric effects of nature, these sketches, although small in scale, successfully capture the physicality of mountains in all their monumental majesty.

Ros Auld is a well-established ceramicist working at Borenore near Orange. Auld has steadily built up a reputation as an accomplished and original ceramicist. She is able to produce large sculptural pieces that are suggestive of the rough hewn nature of rocks and mountain landscapes yet whose surfaces are decorated in subtle and sophisticated designs. These large, open stoneware vessels, painstakingly formed by hand, are built up from clay coils. Balanced on small feet, they have spatial energy and movement. Designed to be viewed almost as a two dimensional canvas, their two long, flat sides provide a surface area for decoration in slips and glazes – decoration that sensitively responds to the character of the vessel.

The artist's use of white crackle glaze to emphasise the lines of the shoulders of her vessels (Turbulence, 2016) as well as areas of the ceramic surface (Oribe, 2017) provides a pleasing contrast in colour and texture to the rest of the form. These beautifully crafted surfaces become personal maps informed by the artist's memory of place and time.

The exhibition also has on display the ceramic porcelain of Tania Vrancic. Her work is inspired by a more focused view of the details of the landscape; namely, the intense greens of lichen-covered rocks. It is in the series of small tablets where the decorative techniques and coloured slips are the most varied and interesting. A further exploration of these decorative effects applied to the artist's larger cylindrical vessels would, I imagine, provide a fruitful project to consider.