To enter this exhibition is to enter a particular journey and emerge from the labyrinth that the creative process can be, into the realm of a strong and confident mature artist.

Marjorie Bussey's technical ability to select the right medium in the service of particular ideas she wishes to express is astonishing, but it is quite simply the result of a lifetime's practice as an artist coupled with the joy of exploring what each medium will do.

Just inside the door, on the left as we enter, are a series of small laser prints which catalogue a storehouse of "specimens", the Minotaurs Cave, which might also be a reliquary for those who have not survived the metaphysical quest which an encounter with the Minotaur entails. Hovering on the surface of these prints are a series of painted interventions, symbols of snake and phallus, circle, shield and caduceus suggesting another form of cataloguing this experience. These small prints provide the particular conceptual thread which Marjorie (as Ariadne) gives us to follow through her labours of the past three years.

Yet sitting down to write this review, I am trying to decide to what degree I followed the sets of meaning implied by this thread or was instead visually seduced by the artist's skill with painted/worked surfaces.

Sometimes the paint is indeed a thread. It sketches, delineates, composes, and texturises Ariadne's robe. Mythically, as her attribute, it defines her formally, and in its unravelling, advances her character's action through the narrative. (The Ariadne Series). At other times, it becomes a skin, holding turbulence beneath the surface in place, as in the central passage of the small exquisite painting Asclepius. High up in the left hand corner is a small, more thinly painted area of pale blue, the realm of aspiration, awareness and release, indicating another possible journey represented by the metamorphic angel/caduceus figure in the right hand field of the painting.

I was as entranced by this tiny work as I was by the large impressive painting Wilderness. The energy of fire leaping from land and sea gives birth to life and form in the artist's complicit summation of creation mythologies. It may also represent the body of the Minotaur. A scored grid contains the action, a comment perhaps on the strategies we have devised philosophically and metaphysically to contain the raw power of nature, of bestiality, and of our experience of this, and suggests also the systems we deploy to represent it and bear witness. The void, in its densely painted black tarriness, is a formal counterweight to the explosive energy of the largest field of the painting, and conceptually, mythically, is always present. It is also the perfect metaphor for the Minotaur's mane. I suspect the artist is suggesting that each one of us, in certain ways, could provide a model for the head.

No wonder the importance of reflection and wine drinking in the Italianate yet strangely oriental landscape of Clouds Among the Pines painted in a similarly vigorous, semi-figurative, abstract style.

The accretions of both nature and culture on land is potently conveyed by the dense variegated layerings of paint and wax in the series of three small works, (relating apparently to the Mallee landscape of the artist's childhood) and the large Wilderness Dreaming with its symbolic tree simultaneously referencing (to me), Aboriginality, the biblical Burning Bush, the Jewish candelabrum, cyclical regeneration, rebirth, light and knowledge. And the difficulty of holding on to any of these continuously and with any certainty.

In totally different vein are the delicate surfaces of the frottages Devonian Journey and Labyrinth. Attached to these are a documentation of the process whereby the artist created these works and her acknowledgement of the Goonyandi people of Fitzroy Crossing who are the traditional custodians of the Mimbi Caves with all that that implies. It was into the actual labyrinthine depths of these Caves that Marjorie descended to find the beginning of time in this land, and to attempt to understand Aboriginal mythic constructions of creation as part of her own personal reconciliatory journey. And then to set such insights against those derived from her European heritage, and understand another system of art making as a result, in the way she knows best, technically, as an artist.

I enjoyed the poetics of the resultant works enormously. The interpretations which a viewer could spin out from them are many and the artist's spirit of enquiry both brave and admirable. A must to see.