Ham Darroch grew up in Sydney and in the mid 1990s studied sculpture at the Canberra School of Art, where he was drawn to the work of David Watt, who was the head of the workshop, and was particularly inspired by the art of the Canberra-based artist Neil Roberts.

He subsequently drifted back to Sydney where he found employment at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

By 2006 he had shifted to London where he worked for many years as a studio assistant to the veteran British Op artist, Bridget Riley.

I think that I am correct in saying that the show at the ANU Drill Hall Gallery is the first major survey exhibition of Darroch's work. Enigmatically titled Propeller, it brings together work from 2008 through to the present, including huge murals, or more fashionably termed installation pieces, painted directly on to the gallery walls.

His work does somewhat vividly reflect a mixture of sources - Watt's installations, Roberts' brilliant improvisations with found materials and Riley's life-long immersion into colour theory. The source that Darroch himself stresses the most is a childhood one, that of his grandfather, who was an aeronautical engineer.

Darroch's father died when he was six and his grandfather become a key person in his life.

Apparently, he was a man with golden hands who took refuge in his shed, where he could reuse and transform materials for virtually any purpose. This idea of alchemy and transforming nothing into something quite magical and unexpected is central to Darroch's art practice.

Darroch's exhibition is quite an elegant but patchy affair where there seems to be a preoccupation in a fairly didactic manner of documenting the artist's sources - whether this be early Sidney Nolan or Mondrian or Riley.

The reused old fashion table-tennis bats, shovels and other utilitarian objects through a bright colour intervention is clever, slightly witty and very elegant.

This is not a hanging offence, but does make it into an ephemeral experience - once you have got it, there is little more to be said or seen.

Paolo Uccello's Battle of San Romano is one of the great masterworks from the early Italian Renaissance.

Initially, the three huge panels (now split between museums in Florence, Paris and London) joined up as a huge continuous mural possibly to decorate a grand bedroom suite with tongue-in-cheek references to sexual encounters.

It is an absolute show-stopper in world art with its endless games in perspective and mesmerising descriptive detail and has inspired many artists throughout the ages to respond to Uccello's challenge.

Most memorably, John Brack responded to this work with its reinterpretation in terms of pens and pencils.

Darroch was also smitten by Uccello and visited the London panel at the National Gallery on many occasions.

The highlight of Darroch's Drill Hall Gallery show is his huge Uccello-inspired mural that he has termed Counter Attack, executed earlier this year.

It measures more than three metres by 12 metres (Uccello's London panel is much smaller, measuring 182 centimetres by 320 centimetres).

Darroch was attracted by the geometry and the tapestry of vision, but interprets it in a relatively subdued palette with delicately painted fans of colour.

It is impressive through scale, the precision of execution, and the general sense of grace and elegance.

In some ways it is more of an exercise than a final thought-through conclusion.

Darroch's exhibition is elegant and engaging, but as a survey it may be a tiny bit premature in this artist's development.