'Brindabellas and beyond' is a rich polyphony of voices

Strathnairn Arts is a government-owned, not-for-profit arts facility in West Belconnen. Once the site of rural tranquillity, the historic homestead of Strathnairn is now surrounded by extensive road works for the new suburbs of Strathnairn and Macnamara. Within the Strathnairn oasis, apart from the homestead, studios, kilns and foundry, there is the historic woolshed that has been transformed into an art gallery.

The artistic director of Strathnairn Arts, Peter Haynes, has been gradually converting the woolshed into a functional gallery space with the addition of partitions, plinths and other gallery paraphernalia.

Alex Kosmas, to some, would appear as a local Greek boy - a graduate of the Canberra School of Art in its heyday in the early 1980s - where he majored in ceramics under Alan Peascod and he took a sub-major in sculpture with Ron Robertson-Swann. Subsequently, Kosmas has worked in sculpture foundries in Melbourne and Sydney assisting other sculptors to realise their projects.

Kosmas, at the age of 62, has returned to Canberra, where he has been an artist-in-residence at Strathnairn. This exhibition, curated by Haynes, represents not only Kosmas's work in sculpture and ceramics completed during his residency, but also contains a selection of earlier work going back to the 1980s - a sort of small survey exhibition of his art.

From the show, it is difficult to establish a clear singular artistic voice or a unifying sensibility. Rather, there is a rich polyphony of voices as the artist in his sculpture moves from a rather formalist geometric language in the 1980s, as in the superb bronze Archaeos (1985), through to more organic, slightly whimsical forms and installed environments in the early 2000s, through to very literal, mimetic forms presently.

The impressive ceramic pieces, including the porcelain Brindabellas (2018), seem to grow out of Kosmas's Frozen terra series, but in a strange way remind me of the work of another Greek-Australian ceramicist and sculptor, the late Marea Gazzard, and her Little Olgas (1984-88) in Parliament House in Canberra. Kosmas's work is more elegant and refined with a strong sense of layering of form conveying a sense of mystery.

The major piece at the exhibition, Precious (2019), is a patinated bronze almost two-metre-high gum tree with a gilded trunk and branches and 252 green bronze leaves. This was fabricated during his residency at Strathnairn using the local foundry. Trees and shrubs of various description, some encased in cages, have figured frequently in Kosmas's recent work but, as far as I am aware, there has been nothing as ornate as this piece. The title, with all of its environmental connotations, makes this tree a very rare and precious specimen indeed. Although it is beautifully crafted, I found the anthropomorphic scale of the piece a little disconcerting, desiring something either more monumental to dwarf me, or more jewel-like and miniature that I could look at and cherish.

Also included in the exhibition are a number of large lithographs by the artist's partner, Janet Coker, who also studied at the Canberra School of Art at the same time as Kosmas, but majored in print-making and worked under the distinguished lithographer Theo Tremblay. Coincidentally, her work also deals with the Brindabellas and possesses a sense of grandeur and majesty. Sadly, the lithographs date from 1986 as Coker had to abandon her art practice and find work in the commercial world to support her family.

This is an unusual exhibition by a sculptor who has spent a good deal of his life working as a midwife for the realisation of other sculptors' art.

It appears that Strathnairn has provided him with the opportunity to refocus his energies on his own creative practice and to some extent to relaunch his career in Canberra.