Christine Druitt Preston: Ephemeral Beauty – a second life! | Weekends 11 October-02 November 2025

Christine Druitt Preston’s practice explores the ways domestic interiors and cultivated gardens serve as vessels of memory, identity, and care. Across printmaking, painting, and drawing, she investigates how such spaces—built, inherited, and eventually relinquished—bear the imprint of those who once tended to them.

Her new exhibition, Ephemeral Beauty – a second life, arises from the passing of her mother in 2024, a moment that sharpened her reflections on time’s fragile and fleeting weight. While flowers provide the central motif, the works extend beyond botanical imagery to consider broader questions of impermanence, place, and human connection. Long a symbol of mortality in the vanitas tradition, the flower here becomes equally a metaphor for resilience and renewal.

This focus continues themes developed in earlier exhibitions such as Olleyland (2019) and Quintet – A Stilled Life (2022), where Druitt Preston engaged with lived-in environments now in transition: Gulgamree in Mudgee, dispersed and untended; Emerson Road in Rosebank, preparing for its next chapter. These works functioned as both witness and archive, translating domestic and natural settings into meditations on loss.

In contrast, Ephemeral Beauty – a second life embraces colour with renewed intensity. Revisiting earlier lino blocks alongside new prints and paintings, Druitt Preston examines the shifting symbolism of flowers across cultures. Once dismissed in the 18th century as a suitably “feminine” subject, floral imagery is reimagined here as a fluid, cross-cultural language, free of such reductive categories.

Neither botanical studies nor simple decoration, these works operate as elegies and offerings. They invite viewers to reflect on the fragility of beauty and the persistence of memory—holding stillness, however briefly, within a world defined by change.