Recently I heard from a friend, the South African earth artist Hanien Conradie, whose environmental work I first came across when she spoke at Dartington in 2018 about her film Dart, made in collaboration with Margaret Le Jeune (USA) at the UK leg of the Global Nomadic Art Project.

I was very pleased to hear that her Flood Series (The Malawi Paintings), in which she explores the theme of flooding, will be shown at the end of next year in Cape Town. Also, that she’s received a commission from the Spier Arts Trust to make a painting of the latest flood in the Breede River Valley, where her grandmother farmed and where the clay she paints with comes from. But for me her most interesting news was that, through her work with the cosmology of animism, she now feels that she’s finding an alternative way to address the ethical and environmental complexities that arise from making a living as a painter in the art world. 

Central to this is what struck me as so significant when I first hear her speak – namely that her work is inseparable form the stories that bind it (and her) to specific ecologies. As she writes: 

‘It seems that the paintings are representing a process and a story that people can relate to. Once they make that connection, they seem to gain a better understanding of what the paintings are. That they are made with matter that I have fostered long and deep relationships with; I mean the clay and ochre I use from very specific places’. 

This insight into the connection between the work and stories about the relationship between people and land has allowed her to try: ‘to move people away from the idea that my paintings are objects to purchase for ownership’. Instead, she is putting forward the idea that individuals who buy her work become custodians of a process that belongs to many beings – including other-than-human beings – but that someone needs to be responsible for looking after it, to live with and have a relationship with it. By promoting this shift from passive ownership to an active notion of the custodianship of an object that is also a process and a story, she is reconnecting those who buy her work with a very old and pervasive respect for the custodianship of shared stories and their role in “making” the world. While she acknowledges that this is ‘quite a leap in consciousness’ for most of her buyers, she rightly sees it as a subtle invitation to a fundamental change of heart. 

Hanien will be coming to England in July 2025 to teach a course about Art and Animism, called The Rainmaker, at Loweswater in England’s Lake District. When I’ve more information about this course I’ll post it on this website.