Artist Hanien Conradie‘s exhibition, Water-Verse, showcases a decade of painting, film and performance where she has worked with water as both medium and teacher. This ongoing, evolving collaboration with water offers a deep meditation on our relationship with the natural world, at a time when droughts, floods, and ecological crises are shaping our shared future.
What we might call ‘paint’ could be described as a collaboration. Water gives form to my emotions, moods and thoughts – and then disappears as it evaporates, leaving the pigment in place.
Hanien Conradie is a fine artist concerned with place and belonging, informed by the cosmology of African animism within the complex human and other-than-human networks that encompass a landscape.
Working with water in a collaboration to animate matter in the form of natural pigments such as clay, soot, ash, and ochre, and with works that include performance rituals and prayers as well as paintings, Hanien explores how water shapes both landscapes and our inner-scapes, asking us to reflect on our relationship with this most vital element. “This body of work is a tribute to the spirit of water,” she says. “Its fluidity, its power, its memory, and its uncanny ability as a medium to express human consciousness. … Water gives form to my emotions, moods and thoughts – and then disappears as it evaporates, leaving the pigment in place.”
During the exhibition — which runs until 22nd February 2026 at Spier Wine Farm, Stellenbosch, South Africa — Hanien will be creating site-specific paintings using ochres from the farm and water from Spier’s lily ponds and the Eerste River.
The exhibition maps Hanien’s work and its evolving relationship with water across time and place:
- Raaswater (2015) re-sounds the silenced Hartebees River near Worcester, where Conradie’s grandmother once farmed. Polluted and empty today, the river once roared so loudly it gave its name to the farm. By collaborating with its yellow clay, Conradie attempted to restore its lost voice.
- Of Water and Invoking (2017) arose during Cape Town’s devastating drought, when she researched Southern African rainmaking rites. Using clays from the Hartebees and Table Mountain rivers, Conradie painted waterscapes of lilies as both grief and prayer for rain.
- In Dart (2018), she inscribed Eugène Marais’s words Diep Rivier, Donker Stroom (Deep River, Dark Stream) into the current of this river in Devon, England.
- In the Tankwa Karoo desert – the ‘Place of Thirst’ – she performed gestures of longing that shaped the performance Reëndans (2019–2021). Inspired by Marais’s Die Dans van die Reën, this work honours rain as spirit and shy maiden whose dance brings renewal.
- In the Flood Series (2023), she uses ancestral clay alongside chalk and ochres from Botswana to embody water’s powerful ability to transform familiar landscapes beyond recognition. She also reflects on the meaning of these global floods, wondering if there are messages from the planet we should be listening to.
- In the film Watervers (2025), she walks backwards into water and disappears in an immersion that considers water from below the surface, contemplating initiation and transformation.
- In her latest series of paintings with river clay and burnt cow dung (2025), she is immersed in water. Through a planned ritualistic container, she asks water intimate questions and water ‘paints’ the images.
The featured image is ‘Rainmaker’, photographic print. Photographer: Sophie Revillard © 2025.
You can find details of Hanien’s Water-Verse: Traces of the Traceless exhibition in Stellenbosch, South Africa (31st October 2025 – 22nd February 2026) at the Spier Wine Farm website, and explore her work at her website.
One of the works featured in Water-Verse is Dart, a film of her ritual encounter with that Devon’s river. She discusses this along with work with places where nothing seemingly remains of their ancient knowledge in her ClimateCultures post, Writing on Water.