Ep.34 Hannelie Coetzee

Hannelie Coetzee’s current practice is influenced by her early work as a professional photographer. 

Those early years of working as a photographer brought her several opportunities to travel extensively across the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region, on commissioned assignments that were mostly centred around the developmental work within this region. Coetzee's subsequent familiarity with SADC, as well as her care for the environment, led her practice to the current position as an artist and most recently...an environmental scientist.

For episode 34 of Stories By Artists, I had a conversation with Hannelie and made a portrait of her at Liberty’s Indwe Park, Braamfontein, where her studio is currently based.

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About Hannelie Coetzee

Hannelie Warrington-Coetzee (b. 1971, South Africa) is a Johannesburg-based visual artist and honorary research fellow at the Global Change Institute (University of the Witwatersrand). Her relational practice regularly centres on public spaces, where she produces interventions that ranges from ephemeral to permanent. Originating out of her respect and concern for the environment, Coetzee employs public experiments on nature-based solutions, most often built out of reclaimed industrial waste, to form unlikely partnerships, including with the surrounding land. Research into these materials and the context of their deployment on-site remains a fundamental component of Coetzee’s process, allowing her to orient her work around its immediate community and locate meaning inherent to the materials used, and thus connecting the audience to the intervention. As a transdisciplinarian, Coetzee’s practice seeks to build new creatures marrying environmental science and social action to better encourage empathy for and engagement with nature.

In 2022 she completed her Master of Science dissertation (with distinction) with Coleen Vogel and Lenore Manderson as supervisors. She interrogated the role of art as a medium for social action at the Wits Animal, Plants and Environmental Science School titled: Eco-art for a transformative climate culture. As research fellow she presents ways on how scientists can reach wider climate audiences through interrogating the ways artists have reached audiences in the past.

She has intervened widely in South Africa and abroad in public space, galleries, sculpture parks, ongoing arts residencies and informal pop-ups. Her recent exhibition In mid-loping gait at Morton Fine Art in Washington DC was well received in the USA with an ongoing series of eco-queer creatures.

‘Curiosity continues to get the better of me’

Hannelie Coetzee, 26 January 2024

www.hanneliecoetzee.com