Today, of course, it's all anyone ever seems to want, in endless scrolls and feeds and pages of everyday life - validated simply through being posted. Breakfast, outfit, conversation, movie, desk, fridge, vase, pavement. A never-ending, self-referential loop of meta-commentary.

Ironically, this proliferation has mostly served to render the mundane ever more so.

For many, it has prompted a return to the delicate, considered art of deliberate elevation, of causing the beauty of small lives to bloom on the page, blossom into a poem, and spread warmth and light across a canvas.

There's no secret, then, to the steady momentum behind the work of Cressida Campbell, one of Australia's most important artists. She has made exploring her immediate surrounds - and elevating them - her life's mission, creating exquisite paintings and prints that show fleeting glimpses of the things that pass through daily life.

A plate of persimmons, a vase of nasturtiums, a row of jugs and cups, the kitchen glimpsed through the living room. And then the steps in the garden, a view of Sydney Harbour, and the coastline around her Sydney home.

The National Gallery of Australia will be showing a major survey of her work as part of its Know My Name campaign, designed to promote the works of prominent but under-recognised Australian women artists.

The show will present the depth and virtuosity of Campbell's work over four decades, from intimate interior views through to panoramic coastal landscapes.

Curator Sarina Noordhuis-Fairfax has said that in documenting her own life, Campbell's art has a direct connection to the times in which she lives.

"The personal nature of her pictures resonates with a wide audience and offers an overview of the last 40 years or so of her story," she says.

"The domestic focus of many of her prints and paintings allows us to piece together a journey through her life from kitchen scraps and watering cans, cut flowers and washing up, postcard souvenirs to harbour views framed through windscreens."

And in creating her work, Campbell is as deliberate and slow as life is fleeting. Each work is a painstaking process that cannot be rushed. She first draws the image on plywood, then inscribes the outlines with an etching tool and paints the sheet with many layers of watercolours.

Finally, she sprays the picture with water and runs it through a printing press, creating a single print.

It's the ultimate elevation, to be able to take so long to create something so meaningful - an image of a moment in time.

You don't have to go far, she seems to be saying, to see something beautiful, even if it disappears in an instant.