Seven days from now Renée Estée will unveil her latest body of work An Echo, A Prayer at COMA Gallery in Marrickville, Sydney. For the Australian-born, New York-based artist, this new body of work began with a devastating phone call — her mother’s second cancer diagnosis — prompting a return to home soil, and a deepened connection to home and the rituals of family life.

Estée's latest paintings contend with these themes of departure and return, the intimacy of grief, and the ways painting can hold memory against the passage of time. And here, speaking with COMA Associate Director Chloe Morrissey, she reflects on the forces that anchor her practice: the enduring bond of sisterhood, the Australian landscape as both refuge and tether, and painting’s capacity to preserve, to outlast, to speak beyond the limits of language.

Chloe Morrissey: I think it would make most sense to almost start this interview chronologically. Where did you grow up?

Renée Estée: I grew up between Melbourne and Canberra, but I did spend most of my childhood in Canberra. And it’s so funny because the second I turned 18, I moved back to Melbourne. I was like I’m going back, I’m getting out of here [Canberra]. I always associate Canberra with being this very lonely, quiet place; it’s one of the only places I don’t romanticise.

I feel like everywhere I live, I romanticise; New York, Cornwall, even when I was living in New York I was romanticising Australia as a whole, from afar.

I just never really felt grounded or at home in Canberra. The second I left I felt free – and maybe I’m always chasing that feeling. Whenever I travel and paint in a new environment it will feel escapist and simultaneously grounding; things I didn’t feel in Canberra.

But one really special thing about my time growing up was that wherever we were, my mum would turn anywhere we lived into a living shrine. I reference this a lot in my first show Choral Ode. She would paint flowers all over the walls, we had Michael Hutchence photos everywhere and anytime I did a drawing it would be put up on the wall. She would paint images of Bob Dylan onto the wall, so we were always living in this shrine, where everything around us was always art everywhere. And anything you were thinking about or obsessing over would just go up (onto the walls) and so I think that even happens in my studio practice where I’m thinking about something I write it down and put it on the wall, because I saw that growing up.

And when you say “we” is that you, your mum and your sister?

Yes, it was the three of us, which I think ties a lot of my work to the idea of familial closeness but also sisterhood. Because my sister and I are just so close. A lot of the books I read are about sisterhood and my mentor Kate Daw at VCA [Victorian College of the Arts] was obsessed with sisterhood, she and her sister were so close too, and a lot of her work was about sisterhood and about this tie that is unbreakable. Similarly, I reference my sister a lot in my works and I say a lot of the time my paintings are dedicated to her. There’s a note on one of my walls that says “All these paintings are for Lil” because that’s the person who has seen me go through everything and we go through everything together. It’s a very shared experience, sisterhood, and if you get through everything together as a unit, you carry that forever and then can get through anything.

Your upcoming show with COMA, titled, An Echo, A Prayer has an even deeper resonance with this idea of familiar connection because it unintentionally coincides with your indefinite return to Australia, following your mums second diagnosis. Do you mind telling me about when your mum first got sick and what that was like?

The first time was 2022 when I was living in New York, I was meant to graduate the next semester from my MFA [Master of Fine Art, Hunter College], and then mum got sick, it was late December and I was getting everything ready for the next semester and she fell sick and we got the call, and by “we” I mean me, and they said you have to come home. I deferred a semester and came back to Australia for a couple of months at the start of 2022. The weird thing is, when I was in Cornwall [for an Artist Residency] at the end of last year [2024] it was the exact same date that mum’s diagnosis came through that the cancer had returned, it was December 13th exactly, a bad date.

Again, I was so far away in another place and that was when I started to think about this idea of an echo, which is in the show’s title An Echo, A Prayer – because an echo will repeat itself and we are returning straight back to where we were.

And just how all-consuming that diagnosis was and that really did change everything after that, nothing felt the same after mum was diagnosed with cancer and I thought ‘okay we are back here again’ and everything was lining up – it was the same diagnosis, it’s in the same spot, spreading and being classified as terminal again.

Which was another really heavy thing: both times we’ve been told that this is the end and that is so heavy to be told that. You have to suddenly confront this finality and even if it becomes kind of a longer process, or maybe someone survives it, there are so many ends throughout that experience anyway; you see somebody losing so many parts of themselves through that.

But then you see how you survive and grow through it as well, and through that I mean we’ve watched mum be completely obliterated by this illness and we felt like we were falling apart, but then we became so much closer through it. You find new ways to stay alive or keep parts of yourself alive through that.

Similar to this upcoming show, your first show with COMA in 2023 also followed your mum’s first cancer diagnosis. Your exhibitions have been these beautiful time capsules of two extremely hard moments in your life. How have you been able to transcribe this into painting?

My mum always says, “It’s just us”. She is such a storyteller and so I thought, how can I tell your story? One of my previous works has this strip of text that references her autobiographical details – from where she was born in Queensland and then she moved down through the rest of Australia.

Then in another previous work called Final Wish (2023) I was thinking about a person’s final wishes because we had to start talking about wills and discussing how certain things would be preserved. Which things, or objects, we should keep. What are the memories that you really want to keep of someone and what are the phrases? That’s where a lot of text comes into my work because I think of people’s final phrases.

I mentioned my mentor Kate Daw before, and she was one of the first people really close to me that I lost, also to cancer. She was like a second mum to me – when I was at VCA she was the Head of Department and we were so close. We would listen to Nick Cave together, and would write each other little letters. Once I graduated, she gave me a studio to paint in; we felt like very kindred spirits. So, when she passed away, also during COVID and because of cancer, a lot of my paintings started to become a way to reach out to her because I never got to say goodbye.

She had a lot of things that she wanted to be remembered by, these final phrases, and my mum does that as well. So, it’s like carrying that final thing that someone wants to be remembered by.

It is interesting because these paintings will outlive your mum, but they will also outlive us.

That’s what I love about painting and what I’ve always loved about painting – I’m like, oh my gosh someone painted this years ago or centuries ago, there’s a “forever” in that. And also, I feel like I am confronted by death, but I also think it’s an eternal, forever thing and I almost see my paintings as a version of that: how when you die, that’s forever and this painting will also last forever. There’s that grappling with eternity and that this will outlive us. Someone’s final words outlive them and then this painting will last beyond on that. I think that’s so beautiful, it is like this lasting statement.

I have talked about love letters and epitaphs a lot, but it’s like a living form of that and you can return to someone’s voice and memory by looking at a painting. You’re transported back in time but then you can always relate a painting to whatever you’re going through currently. You can feel someone navigating this space of loss or space of discovery, it doesn’t always have to be loss, and that’s the eternal human experience.

"I feel like I am confronted by death, but I also think it’s an eternal, forever thing and I almost see my paintings as a version of that: how when you die, that’s forever and this painting will also last forever. There’s that grappling with eternity and that this will outlive us."

Right now you’ve also just moved back to Australia, indefinitely, due to your mum’s second diagnosis. Has this reinvigorated your relationship to Australia or place?

Prior to 2022 I hadn’t been back to Australia because of COVID. It was this weird thing to be refreshed by the Australian landscape.

When I went back to New York in 2023 to finish painting the first COMA show, following my mum’s first diagnosis, everything was so driven by this connection to Australia and it just felt really, really fertile. I was like ‘Oh my god, everything is about this connection to home’ and that’s why I think a lot of those works are so Australiana. The works in this show grapple with that connection further. After thinking about home after being away for so many years having no access to it, I started to really romanticise Australia, this place that I grew up desperately wanting to leave, I was always like, the second I can, I’m out. Now I’ve returned.

One time when I was a kid, a psychic went up to my mum and was like, “your daughter’s going to move to New York” and this was when I was like 7. But I had this total yearning to escape and to get out of Australia, then the second I moved away I suddenly started to romanticise where I was from. I began realising the profound effect that home has on you and how you are shaped by where you’re from, and I’d always brushed that aside until I was away.

So then my paintings became a way of honouring Australia as both a space that started to feel really special to me as I was away, and also this place that my mum lives, and so I felt I needed to make these paintings to bring importance to her life and lament her memory.

And yes, I am here [in Australia] specifically for that. Beforehand I was questioning ideas around the afterlife or was interested in what other people think about it, but I wasn’t so pressed up against that personally. If my mum wasn’t unwell, I wouldn’t be here in Australia right now. And if I wasn’t facing this imminent death, I wouldn’t even be making these paintings, I would be making a completely different body of work. There’s something painfully beautiful about that though: you never know what’s about to happen, which which experiences in life will start to underpin your work.

My work used to live in this space where I wanted to keep it as open as possible and have as many entry ways as possible, but for this particular body of work I want it to be about departure and return, about contending with the idea of losing someone. And that is something we are all going to have to go through.

I think even in the way that I am building these paintings up, even though there is a restraint and they are stripped back, there is a lot more forcefulness to some of the gestures and marks that I feel carry a bit more weight, that we are here and we are sitting with this. It’s at the forefront of every painting I make at the moment; this impact of loss is something I carry with me every day. It’s the most human part of existence, to live you have to die, and there is death every day, and so I do want them to be more guttural and forward like that; where they are pressing up against you with very obvious references to that.

"It’s the most human part of existence, to live you have to die, and there is death every day, and so I do want them to be more guttural and forward like that; where they are pressing up against you with very obvious references to that."

I agree that this new body of work has a more guttural impact, or more immediate impact compared to your previous body of work. But I also think there are beautiful moments of lightness and reprieve that I haven’t seen before. Would you agree with that?

I definitely wanted the works to have a bit more space to breathe and I have been very interested in Jean Valentine and the way her writing structures deal with pauses and that a break is a moment to celebrate and that I can become a bit more comfortable with absence or a moment of silence.

I feel like before I wanted my paintings to be so noisy and so heavy because I wanted every single memory to be in there, I want it to keep everything alive. But if you just have a moment that’s a bit more silent, like a stained surface, or an area of the painting that is washed back and almost becomes a space of absence, which can speak to absence itself, then you can also step back and pause in that moment and then you can contend with everything happening around compositionally but also thematically. I think being able to feel comfortable in silence is a difficult thing to do.

I can see a number of star cut outs adorned on your studio walls and I assume will probably make their way into the work, if not directly then referentially?

Yes, and there is another quote on my wall that says “The stars were all orange” because every night I go out and count which stars are orange, and I message my sister and tell her which stars are orange.

Because orange stars are on their way to dying?

Yes, but now I have moved away from orange and am pushing the red in my palette because it is the signifier that they are actually dying, they go orange and then they turn red, and then they either die or become a supernova, I think. Don’t quote me on that.

Where does “all the stars are orange come from” is that a direct quote?

No, that’s just something I said to my sister because we were sitting outside of a church at 3am waiting for an ambulance to come and pick my mum up because they had to have access to the house, so we were just outside as we live next to a church. And we were just holding each other, and I looked up and said “Oh all the stars are orange” and I thought, we are in this moment watching someone that we love coming so close to dying, like the stars.

And now I’ll text my sister whenever I’m at a low point and say, “all the stars are orange” and it has become this sentence we just say to each other.

But I am also interested in the cut-out stars being off-cut canvas from either previous paintings or just canvas on the floor. And it’s like these prior works or the ghosts from old works are guiding me.

Well stars are scientifically used as tools for navigation and even anecdotally ‘the stars will guide you’…

Or even more lowbrow colloquially, horoscopes.

But they do, in every sense, they are intended to inform you in one way or another or are intrinsically tied to this idea of journey.

Also, I think as a result of living in different places, the stars can point you to somewhere else, which is always a reminder that things exist outside of you. I always thought of the star as the ultimate ghost figure, because a lot of them are already on their way to dying, they are up above us, they are ever present.

I have been thinking about the novel Housekeeping by Marilyn Robbison a lot since the last time I was here – you introduced me to her work. It's essentially about two sisters who find companionship in their shared experience of loss or grief. Is this idea of intimacy within grief something that resonates with you?

Oh yeah, absolutely. The intimacy in grief binds you to people. I’ve grappled with so many existential questions in these moments of grief and also through listening to the people around me and what they are thinking about during that time as well. Which I also think comes into the title of the show, Like an Echo, Like a Prayer, I feel like when you come together with people in a space of mourning, you’re coming together in prayer and kind of praying for each other and trying to find a way to keep going together.

I think that that’s the biggest thing I’ve learned, especially this second time around, that I wouldn’t have survived this without the ritual aspects of coming together. Which is something I have tried to emulate in these paintings, this sense of coming together, how can each work gesture to another within one body of work, enveloping each other or supporting each other in some way.

Painting is a way for me to navigate and make sense of everything that is happening right now, but also question what happens next.

Renée Estée's exhibition An Echo, A Prayer opens next Friday 5 September 2025 at COMA Gallery in Marrickville, Sydney. The show will run until Saturday 4 October.