Christine Druitt Preston | Ephemeral Beauty - A Second Life!

Christine Druitt Preston’s practice occupies a distinctive position within contemporary Australian printmaking and painting, one that negotiates the intersections of memory, place, and the everyday. Her sustained interest lies in how domestic interiors and cultivated gardens operate as repositories of both private and collective histories—sites where identity is constructed, nurtured, and eventually relinquished. In her hands, the ordinary becomes a locus of quiet reflection, charged with the emotional weight of human presence and absence.

The artist’s recent body of work, Ephemeral Beauty – a second life, emerges from the profound rupture occasioned by the passing of her mother in 2024. While the transient beauty of flowers provides the exhibition’s central motif, Druitt Preston extends this symbolism toward broader considerations of time, fragility, and impermanence. Here, the flower—long employed in Western art history as a vanitas emblem—becomes both subject and metaphor: a reminder of mortality, but equally, a gesture towards renewal, resilience, and the persistence of memory.

This concern with memory and place is a consistent thread across Druitt Preston’s practice. Earlier projects such as Olleyland (2019) and Quintet – A Stilled Life (2022) engaged directly with environments preserved through cultural imagination or family inheritance. Properties like Gulgamree in Mudgee and Emerson Road in Rosebank, once richly inhabited, are now sites of transformation and erasure: gardens untended, rooms vacated, lives moving on. Druitt Preston’s works, often monochromatic in these series, function simultaneously as witness, relic, and archive, aligning her practice with broader conversations around memory studies and the role of the artist as custodian of lived experience.

In Ephemeral Beauty – a second life, however, colour steps decisively into the foreground. Through drawing, painting, and the reworking of earlier lino blocks, Druitt Preston interrogates the cultural and symbolic dimensions of flowers across history. Once regarded as an appropriately “feminine” subject—dismissed by Gerard de Lairesse in 1707 as “so feminine, so suitable for a woman”—floral imagery here is reimagined as a fluid, cross-cultural visual language, unbound from such reductive categorizations. In this sense, Druitt Preston’s work converses not only with the Dutch still-life tradition but also with contemporary feminist reappraisals of subjects historically relegated to the margins of “serious” art.

The works are not botanical illustrations in any conventional sense. Rather, they operate as elegies and offerings—poetic attempts to hold stillness within an accelerating world. They embody the paradox at the heart of Druitt Preston’s practice: that fragility, once acknowledged, becomes a form of strength, and that what slips away leaves behind traces capable of shaping memory, identity, and belonging.

In positioning flowers as both subject and metaphor, Druitt Preston contributes to a wider discourse within contemporary art that reclaims the decorative, the domestic, and the intimate as legitimate and vital grounds for critical reflection. Ephemeral Beauty – a second life thus stands as both personal memorial and universal meditation, situating the artist’s practice within a lineage of still-life traditions while also asserting its relevance to present-day conversations around place, memory, and the passage of time.