Art review: Alison Wright: Spun: Works on paper at Nishi Gallery in Canberra

The Nishi Gallery, tucked away behind the Nishi building in Acton, is a neat 200-square-metre white cube space with high concrete ceilings and flooded with natural light from the skylights and floor-to-ceiling windows opening out towards the gardens. It is a new art space which can be hired by artists, curators and performers. The only downside, that I am aware of, is that it is not an art-only dedicated space and when I visited this show, they were setting up for a function in the exhibition space.

Alison Wright, known to many in Canberra as a colleague at the National Gallery, is having her second solo exhibition in this venue. Many of us, including myself, missed her first solo show in Shanghai in China in 2013, where she had been living for a number of years. She is a Western Australia-trained sculptor, who graduated a couple of decades ago and has dedicated this exhibition, together with much of her art practice, to the natural cocoon of the silkworm.

She prefaces the statement in her exhibition catalogue with the Buddhist mantra: "Nothing is permanent. Everything is subject to change. Being is always becoming." Her obsession with the cocoon started while she was still at art school, where she was building up forms to create cocoon-like structures, inspired by Antoni Gaudí, the Catalan genius modernist whose spiritually inspired organic forms created some of the most unusual and breathtaking forms in all of modern art. Wright was apparently fascinated with the cocoon shape as well as the process of flux and change involved in its making and has painted, decorated and played with the cocoon for many years.

This exhibition physically consists of hundreds, if not thousands, of evacuated natural silkworm cocoons (apparently mainly sourced from China) that have become the primary materials through which Wright constructs her art works. Masses of these cocoons are embedded in heavy Italian paper to make quite subtle compositions built up as white on white so that the surface, texture and shadow become critical elements in these low-relief works on paper.

Scale is quite important in the conception of the work to assert a sense of presence in these pieces with some stretching over two or three metres. In one instance, black ink is introduced to highlight a sense of drama, but most pieces are permitted to assert a rather minimal existence. The whole show becomes a form of meditation on something that is simple, organic and caught in a constant process of metamorphosis. Each natural silk cocoon is beautiful and perfect in its own right, almost identical to that of its neighbour, but at the same time unique. When combined with paper the silk cocoons appear to float freely in the gallery space.

This is a most unusual exhibition that emits its own sense of peace and tranquillity.