$5,000.00
$2,500.00
Sydney-based artist Christine Druitt Preston brings a deep sensitivity to the act of artmaking, weaving together printmaking, collage, embroidery, and installation to reflect on memory, place, and the quiet rituals of domestic life. A graduate of Alexander Mackie CAE, the National Art School, and Alfred University in New York, Druitt Preston’s work acknowledges the lineage of women artists and artisans before her—those whose practices blurred the lines between art and craft, and whose legacy continues to shape contemporary visual language.
Her art invites conversation about the nature of creation itself. Through layered imagery and tactile surfaces, Druitt Preston examines how we inhabit our world—how the spaces we build, nurture, and eventually leave behind come to embody memory and emotion. I’m drawn to the quiet poetry of domestic interiors and gardens, she says, and the way these environments carry memory, shape identity, and bear the imprint of those who once tended to them.
Over her career, Druitt Preston has been widely recognised in Australia’s major art awards. In 2023 alone, she was a finalist in the Blacktown City Art Prize, Sunshine Coast Art Award, Naked & Nude Art Prize at Manning Regional Gallery, and The Gosford Art Prize. Her accolades include the Highly Commended Award at the 2021 KAAF Art Prize (Korean Cultural Centre, Sydney), the People’s Choice Award at the 2019 Sunshine Coast Art Prize, the Bathurst Purchase Prize (Works on Paper) in 2019, and the Southern Cross Open Award the same year.
Her works are held in numerous collections, including the Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery, the Tweed Regional Gallery & Margaret Olley Centre, Bathurst Regional Gallery, the Brooklyn Art Library (NY, USA), and both The State University of New York and Alfred University in the United States.
Druitt Preston’s current exhibition, Ephemeral Beauty – A Second Life (2025), marks a deeply personal evolution in her practice. Created in the wake of her mother’s passing in 2024, the series contemplates the fleeting beauty of flowers—and, more profoundly, the fragility of memory, place, and human connection.
In earlier exhibitions like Olleyland (2019) and Quintet – A Stilled Life (2022), she reflects, I explored lived-in environments from another era—spaces preserved in memory but slowly slipping from physical reach. As these spaces change, the works become both witness and relic—monochrome meditations on a moment now passed.
With Ephemeral Beauty – A Second Life, colour moves to the foreground. Through drawing, painting, and printmaking, Druitt Preston revisits earlier lino blocks and introduces new floral imagery inspired by cross-cultural symbolism. Once deemed an appropriately 'feminine' subject, flowers now serve as a universal metaphor—symbols of resilience, renewal, and the tender impermanence of life itself.
These images are not simply botanical studies, she writes. They are elegies. They are offerings. And they are attempts to hold something still, if only for a moment, in a world that keeps moving. ~ Christine Druitt Preston, August 2025.
Available Work
