Impressive but never imposing large-scale sculptures inhabit Ron and Terrie Gomboc’s Sculpture Park all year round like grazing fabulous beasts.

But once a year the spacious indoor galleries are given over to showcasing smaller works by Australian and international sculptors.

These works, this year including pieces by established artists such as Gomboc himself, others by recent graduates such as Reija Lee Thomas, are important not merely because of their intrinsic worth. Their smaller sizes and prices and attractiveness lend them to fostering an appreciation of sculpture as an art form in the broader public, through being ideally suited to domestic interiors and private gardens.

This is not to characterise them as being merely decorative. There is some gritty, uncompromising work here, such as Norton Flavel’s cold-cast bronzes Iron Grip and Rock-up, the playful punning of whose titles belie their tough, elemental forms, textures and colours.

These qualities can also be found in May Ali’s mixed media works Beyond the Surface #1 and #2, which draw their inspiration from bare brick and roughly rendered walls — cracked surfaces carry the memories of successive layers of paint.

By contrast there are Sang-Sug Kim’s smooth figurative forms in white and pink and black granite and bronze, The Place Where a Heart Stays, and Ayad Alqaragholli’s attenuated figures of man and beast in silicon bronze playfully balancing on a hoop or the back of a chair, Buddy and Companion.

There are fine, larger abstract works. Some are not so much semi-representational as articulating familiar, if not familial, ideas. Gomboc’s Plus Two in Corten weathering steel, in which three forms — mother bird and two offspring — are reduced to undulating essentials, is a case in point. On the other hand, Haruyuki Uchida’s beautiful Embrace and Stationary Shape, in stainless steel and brass or rock, explore formal and metaphorical concepts using a harsher geometry.

Then there are those fun yet serious works that invite extended contemplation, such as Michael Le Grand’s witty, bendy painted steel pieces Betwixt and Bollard and Masaya Daito’s Green and Black and White, which fuse molten glass bottles to create strangely sensual shapes.

There are paintings, too, by such luminaries as Robert Juniper, which are displayed together with sculptures, as one might find them in a home. But with this exhibition, which also features works by Sharon Callow, Kensuke Todo, Bev Iles, Philippa O’Brien and Nien Schwarz, the Gombocs are essentially feeling contemporary sculpture’s pulse and finding it in very rude health indeed.

Sculpture Survey 2017 - 34th Annual Exhibition is on until July 2.