Toy Box is a very full exhibition with 72 works in a range of media including linocuts, oils, etchings, sculpture and mixed media. It is an eclectic, tongue-in-cheek mixture with the majority of the works thematically related to the exhibition’s title.

In the centre of the gallery space 32 “toys” are displayed on two rectangular, narrow-legged bases. Each of the “toys” is equipped with wheels and the linear arrangement of the massed “vehicles” imparts a sort of inexorability, an implied movement that perhaps leads nowhere.

The individual “toys” are quirky and exude a whimsy and satirical edge that speaks somewhat of the objects created by Dada and Surrealist artists but relieved of the shock value often associated with those movements.

Ward uses found objects and repurposed objects (tools, paint brush) to reinforce the double-take character seen in many of these works. Titles apparently provide cues for each of the works but their often personal nature obfuscates rather than assists meaning. Each object holds its own personality and it is this that gives them their attraction.

The wall pieces that constitute the rest of the exhibition include a number of stylistic streams. The majority continue the character that gives charm to the “toys”. These (e.g. Cat’s 53, 55, 56, 63, 64, 65) have a visually soft palette with an interesting surface texture. Motifs are outlined in black and “coloured in” in a manner whose simplicity belies a sophisticated approach to the processes used by the artist. This outlining model is also seen a number of oils (e.g. Cat’s 43, 44, 46, 47). Colours are blocked into the abstracted naïve forms of figures and other objects in a primitivistic style that echoes the directness of early 20th-Century Expressionism, but a directness softened by the subtlety of the artist’s palette.

The “toy”-based works (both two- and three-dimensional) clearly offer a familial connectedness to the exhibition. This is however subverted by the inclusion of a number of works whose relationship to the above appears to be that they were made by the same artist.

Overall visual unity does not seem to matter to Ward and the exhibition’s pictorial and thematic thrust is diluted rather than intensified by works such as The Couple (Cat. 72) and The Honorable Peter Dutton in Drag (Cat. 49). These are in themselves fine but sit aesthetically outside the Toy Box works. Others in this category include Bombay Road Braidwood (Cat. 48) whose pallid reflection of the iconic works of Rosalie Gascoigne does not serve Ward well.

A group of large linocuts (Cat's 59, 62, 67) based on Guerella [sic] Bay demonstrates both technical acumen and aesthetic finesse but bears no thematic affinity with the majority of the exhibition. Another linocut – Run for Your Life (Cat. 33) – is a particularly effective work that capitalises on the graphic qualities of a black-and-white palette and does hold stylistic and thematic affinities with much of the rest of the exhibition, and in this makes inclusive sense.

Toy Box is populated with much good work buts its strength as an exhibition is undermined by perplexing inclusions that mark it as visually confusing.