This exhibition at the Canberra Glassworks is a unique pairing of two Canberra-based artists. Tom Rowney works in glass and Zeljko Markov has a multidisciplinary practice with an interest in wood and furniture. For the exhibition Rowney has chosen works in glass using Venetian cane techniques and Markov has exhibited a series of graphic drawings and wood sculptures. In their works both investigate the linear possibilities of designing patterns that define form and space. They have an appreciation not only of the materiality of their chosen media but an understanding of traditional skills of craftsmanship.

Rowney is the technical manager at the Canberra Glassworks as well as being a highly skilled and respected professional artist. He has had a long career in teaching and has worked in the studios of many eminent glass artists such as Nick Mount, Matthew Curtis, Ben Edols and Kathy Elliott.

From early in his career Rowney has been intrigued by Venetian techniques of using glass canes to produce a repertoire of intricate and decorative filigree patterns. He has become a knowledgeable and skilled proponent of these traditional glassmaking techniques that go back many centuries.

In History Repeated, the recent exhibition at Craft ACT curated by Mel George, examples of glass held in the Corning Museum of Glass in New York became the inspiration for contemporary glass artists. Rowney was paired with Giampaolo Seguso from an ancient family of Murano glassmakers. It was a profitable pairing as Rowney's two vases were an inspired reworking using the cane techniques of Seguso's original work Vaso Ciliegio. Seguso's influence appears in Rowney's use of the aventurine motif (a glass marbling technique that originally imitated the green semi-precious stone aventurine). It is demonstrated to great effect in three vessels in this exhibition (the works are unnumbered and untitled) – a small-necked vessel, an open bowl and a large urn.

In the small-necked vessel and bowl the green aventurine motif is used with great panache. The surface of the glass vessels are made up of patterns of bright green glass paired with other areas of clear glass crisscrossed in feathered black linear lines rather like the rich patterns of peacock feathers. In the tall urn the effect is even more exotic with black longitudinal lines with gold highlights running down the glass form. The effect of these wavy lines is magical as it appears as if streams of water are flowing unevenly down a glass surface. This serves to enliven the form of the glass so that it appears to be indented and undulating, but this is an optical illusion as the decorative patterns are captured between smooth layers of clear glass. These three works are outstanding. And while they certainly present a richness of tradition and are almost Byzantine in their splendour, they also indicate Rowney's emerging interest in exploring new forms and more colourful and free-flowing areas of cane work.

Markov is more known for his work based on making art in wood. In the exhibition he has presented a carefully conceived body of work that links his series of drawings and his three sculptures in wood. The compelling drawings in black pigment ink are compositions made up of a field of thin horizontal lines that encompass the picture plane and are only contained by a thin border. The fine network of lines that defines the two-dimensional space of the paper is echoed in the network of filigree patterns that define the three-dimensional forms of Rowney's glass vessels. At first glance these drawings seem alike and repetitious. However, they repay closer study. Small interruptions where lines are not quite even or where lines stop, run together or are drawn tighter together are like bleeps on a radar screen. On closer observation it becomes apparent that each drawing is quite different in a subtle way. Each one has the lines merging together to form areas of light and dark tonal masses that create an impression of a shifting horizon. It is easy to feel mesmerised by this elusive horizon as you are drawn into the endless space it creates. Two of the wooden sculptures are constructed from a regular pairing of two layers of different coloured timber. They may relate to the stratified nature of the drawings but I find these wooden sculptures problematic. Their stolidness does not make it easy to evoke much response from or interaction with the viewer. The third wooden sculpture makes more sense to me as it reproduces in the various grains of wood the complexity of the patterning that correlates with Rowney's glass and Markov's drawings. Nevertheless, as a body of work, it is obviously more than its parts and repays some thought and contemplation.