Water-Verse: Traces of the Traceless – Hanien Conradie at Spier Wine Farm

Water shapes us. It flows through every body, nourishes every field, and carves its presence into the earth. But what happens when we listen to water—not as a resource, but as a living, remembering presence? This is the question at the heart of Water-Verse: Traces of the Traceless, a deeply contemplative exhibition by Hanien Conradie, currently showing at Spier Wine Farm.

Conradie’s work spans a decade of intimate dialogue with water—as a medium, a subject, and a sacred force. Through paintings, ritual performance, and prayerful gestures, she invites viewers into a slow, immersive experience where water speaks in pigment, gesture, silence, and memory.

A Decade of Listening to Water

Water-Verse unfolds in quiet, chronological layers. Each body of work reflects a moment in Conradie’s journey, where water has been both teacher and collaborator.

In Raaswater (2015), she returns to the Hartebees River—now dry and polluted—where her grandmother once farmed. Using the river’s yellow clay, Conradie gives voice to a silenced landscape, asking what it means to mourn, remember, and restore.

During Cape Town’s near-catastrophic drought in 2017, Of Water and Invoking emerged as a prayer and a plea. Drawing on Southern African rainmaking traditions and painting with clays from Hartebees and Table Mountain, she painted lilies in longing—a gesture of grief and invocation.

In Dart (2018), the artist inscribed Eugène Marais’s haunting words—“Diep Rivier, Donker Stroom”—into a flowing stream, a poetic act of surrender to language and water’s own rhythm.

Her performance series Reëndans (2019–2021), developed in the arid Tankwa Karoo, channeled the longing of the land. Inspired again by Marais, she performed gestures of invocation, honouring rain as a spirit—elusive, necessary, and deeply feminine.

By 2023, the Flood Series responded to water’s fierce return—this time not as absence, but as overwhelming presence. Using ancestral clays and ochres from Botswana, Conradie painted transformed landscapes, confronting water’s power to erase, rearrange, and awaken.

The exhibition culminates in the poetic short film Watervers (2025), where Conradie walks backward into water and vanishes—a final act of surrender and transformation. Here, water is both ending and beginning; a threshold of unknowing and becoming.

Water as Spirit and Collaborator

Conradie’s approach is neither didactic nor decorative. She works with natural pigments—ash, ochre, clay, soot—allowing water to animate them. “Water gives form to my emotions, moods, and thoughts,” she says. “Then it disappears, leaving only pigment.” In this way, every painting becomes a trace of what cannot be fully held: a moment, a gesture, a breath.

Each piece is less a product than a residue of relationship—between artist, earth, and element. Her process is rooted in indigenous sensibility and deep ecological reverence, where art is not separated from land or spirit.

Why Spier, Why Now?

Set against the tranquil backdrop of Spier Wine Farm, the exhibition finds resonance in its setting. What may appear to be peaceful ornamental ponds are, in fact, part of a living water recycling system. Here, all of the farm’s wastewater is naturally cleaned and returned to the land—an act of stewardship that mirrors Conradie’s ethos.

During the first month of Water-Verse, Conradie will create a site-specific painting within the gallery space using ochres and water from Spier’s own ponds. Visitors will have the rare chance to witness her process unfold, watching how the environment becomes co-creator.

An Invitation to Slow Down

In an era of ecological urgency—of floods, fires, and failing rains—Water-Verse offers a space for stillness, reverence, and reconnection. It does not preach or protest. Instead, it asks us to feel. To remember that water is not just substance, but spirit; not just backdrop, but participant.

In Conradie’s hands, water becomes mirror and message—an echo of what is deepest in us. To visit Water-Verse is not only to witness an artist’s ten-year communion with the element, but to be drawn into our own. Into memory, grief, transformation, and perhaps, new ways of listening.

Exhibition: Water-Verse: Traces of the Traceless
Artist: Hanien Conradie
Venue: Spier Wine Farm, Stellenbosch
Dates: Ongoing