Collection: Old Wine Cellar

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

Water is life. It flows through our bodies and the ecosystems we depend on. It nourishes plants, shapes landscapes, and sustains all living things. Without it, there can be no regeneration, no farming, no future.

This exhibition invites us to consider water not only as a resource, but as a presence: fluid, powerful, and memory-bearing.

Over the last decade, Conradie has engaged with rivers, droughts and floods, creating works where water is both medium and teacher.

Through paintings, performance rituals and prayers, she explores how water shapes landscapes and inner-scapes alike, asking us to reflect on our relationship with this most vital element.

“This body of work is a tribute to the spirit of water,” Conradie says. “Its fluidity, its power, its memory, and its uncanny ability as a medium to express human consciousness.”

Working with natural pigments such as clay, soot, ash, and ochre, Conradie allows water to animate matter. “What we might call ‘paint’ could be described as a collaboration,” she says. “Water gives form to my emotions, moods and thoughts – and then disappears as it evaporates, leaving the pigment in place.”

The exhibition unfolds in a loose chronology, mapping Conradie’s work and its evolving relationship with water across time and place.

Water-Verse is an invitation to slow down and listen: to rivers, rain, floods, silence – and to the traces that water leaves in us. Whether through Conradie’s clay paintings, her ritual performances, or her meditative inks, the exhibition asks us to feel water as more than backdrop. It asks us to recognise it as spirit, teacher, and mirror of our own consciousness.