Christine Druitt Preston 2025

My practice is grounded in a deep curiosity about how we choose to inhabit the world—through the spaces we build, inherit, and eventually leave behind. I’m drawn to the quiet poetry of domestic interiors and gardens, and the way these environments carry memory, shape identity, and bear the imprint of those who once tended to them.

The passing of my mother in 2024 brought time—and its fleeting, tender weight—sharply into focus. This exhibition, Ephemeral Beauty – a second life, emerges from that moment of rupture. It reflects on the transient beauty of flowers, yes, but also on the fragility of place, memory, and human connection.

In earlier exhibitions like Olleyland (2019) and Quintet – A Stilled Life (2022), I explored lived-in environments from another era—spaces preserved in memory but slowly slipping from physical reach. Gulgamree in Mudgee is no longer in familiar hands; its garden is now only a ghost. Emerson Road in Rosebank too is preparing for its next chapter. As these spaces change, the works become both witness and relic—monochrome meditations on a moment now passed.

For this new body of work, colour steps into the foreground. Using drawing, painting, and printmaking, I’ve reimagined earlier lino blocks and created new prints that explore the symbolism of flowers across cultures. Once considered an exclusively feminine subject—“so feminine, so suitable for a woman,” wrote Gerard de Lairesse in 1707—flowers today speak in a broader, more fluid visual language, unconstrained by gender.

These images are not simply botanical studies. 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.

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