A Stilled Life: Essay

By Bridget Macleod

A Stilled Life immediately draws you in. The patterned black and white floor covering has a mesmerising effect, calling for you to walk onto it, and into the world of Christine Druitt-Preston. Because this exhibition, while heavily researched and steeped in the history of Hazlehurst, is also deeply personal and represents a culmination of years of work by the artist. 

Druitt-Preston’s work focuses on domestic interiors and gardens, so the decision to explore Hazlehurst cottage was immediate and obvious. However, the show also offered an opportunity to extend her practice beyond lino block prints, a chance to create her first whole room installation. She wished to transform the space, challenging the authority of the traditional white cube and providing the audience with a new lens through which to experience the gallery and see printmaking. 

While this was a conscious choice, her process was further broadened by circumstances outside of her control. Traditionally the artist will spend weeks in a space, creating drawings which form the basis for her prints. However, the period she had set aside for this work was beset by lockdowns and wet weather, so she instead turned to the history of Ben and Hazel Broadhurst and the house they designed and later gifted to the public. Her resources included the Sutherland Shire Council booklet, The Hazelhurst Story, David Mudie Cunningham’s exhibition essay from The Ghost Show and the artist David Rankin, whose parents and grandparents worked at the house as gardeners and housekeepers. This immersion in the history of the house and its occupants mean the show is filled with clever references, and the artist feels the three prints based on this research– Roadside bouquet, Bouquet for Hazel and Illumination - are the strongest works she has ever made.

Indeed, these prints are beautifully rendered, a proliferation of patterns in carefully etched line. In the two bouquet works, one depicting natives found in the area and the other the carefully cultivated blooms that once grew in the Hazlehurst grounds, the patterning of the wallpaper and table coverings merge with the flowers, blurring the edges between foreground and background and creating a captivating field of pattern. Illumination is likewise abstracted, with fleur-de-lys wallpaper snaking across the ceiling rose and through the chandelier. 

The three other exhibited prints, Home alone, My place, and My place in sunshine, depict the home of the artist - the spaces she inhabits, the things she chooses to surround herself with. Druitt-Preston sees the personal environments that people create to inhabit evidence of the lives they live, and through this exhibition has allowed us to immerse ourselves not just in the lives of the subjects, but of the artist as well. 

The prints are the keystone of the exhibition, but also have an important second life, adapted to help create the other pieces on display. As Druitt-Preston hand rubs and prints her works, it will often take multiple attempts to get a copy she is satisfied with. This has been built into her practice, in that she is always looking for different ways of using the prints – collaging, rescaling and reinterpreting to see where else she can take them.

The resulting repetition of shapes accords a continuity to a body of work, particularly important in the case of A Stilled Life, as the heavily patterned room could easily become overwhelming. Instead, it has an internal unity, making for a beautifully balanced installation with details of prints repeating in the wallpaper and floor covering, two chairs and a table, a cushion, a wall hanging and the mirror above a vase of native flowers. This is most notable and ingenious in the case of the chairs and one of three shirts hanging from hooks on the wall. What initially appears to be fabric is in fact paper, meticulously cut and sewn to seamlessly resemble everyday items, work Druitt-Preston undertook herself. While she has been sewing on paper since the 1980s, this was her first time re-upholstering with paper, which she has achieved with great aplomb, down to the piping. 

The shirts are likewise scrupulously constructed, important as they reference the shirt making company established by John Preston Broadhurst and passed to Ben in 1936. Along with the printed shirt there are two translucent white shirts referencing Ben’s brothers Maurice and Jack, who were both killed in action in World War I. Their ghostly appearance also references Ben’s interest in psychic phenomena - séances were often held at Hazelhurst and he believed he could communicate with the dead.

Hazel’s role has been credited in the inclusion of the tea towels and aprons embroidered with the days of the week and common domestic duties – wash, shop, clean, bake etc. The couple had a son who died when he was four, and adopted three children, orphaned during a bombing raid on London, and they are referenced in the wall hangings decorated with images of children playing taken from 1950s children’s colouring books. Through this the artist also wanted to reference Hazlehurst’s current iteration, with visiting children constantly at play in the garden, and to entice them into the galleries. The cutouts are at child height, helping to create a space everybody can engage in. 

The accessibility of the space was an important thread throughout the planning of the exhibition. Druitt-Preston was interested in seeing whether inhabiting a gallery with the trappings of home disrupts its established purpose, allowing the audience to develop a new way of thinking about art. The division between ‘high’ art and ‘low’ craft and association of the latter with femininity has always been of interest to Druitt-Preston. With the definition of craft tied to functionality, the artist wanted to render the exhibited objects unusable through employment of non-traditional, fragile materials and to see how this affects people’s perception of the space.

The title A Stilled Life was taken from the poem ‘Afterwards’ by Thomas Hardy, a contemplation of life continuing after death, acknowledging the bequest made by the Broadhursts and their legacy to the community. The poem also explores the importance placed by the protagonist on noticing the small beauties in life - an argument for taking the time to fully engage with this exquisite installation.