Stephané Conradie looks at the way people categorise and arrange objects in their homes to signify concepts of cultural ‘situatedness’.

While the objects that inspire her art-practice are seemingly only used for aesthetic purposes in home displays, Conradie suggests that they provide us with an important lens for understanding identity formation and cultural creolisation that results from the continued movement of people due to colonialism, displacement and migration.

In this work, titled Thohoyandou, Conradie layers a screenprinted ornate frame over a linoleum relief print. The screenprinted frame utilises photographic images of found objects, collaged together, which are suggestive of the objects that landscape paintings would often be surrounded by in the post-colonial homes Conradie grew up in, in South Africa and Namibia. The relief print in turn mimics the Utopian style of landscape paintings Conradie observed in the domestic interiors she was surrounded by.

Conradie is currently a PhD candidate in Visual Arts at the University of Stellenbosch and a lecturer in Printmedia at Michaelis School of Fine Arts, UCT, South Africa.

Most recently Conradie was included in the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair (2019), Materiality (2020) exhibition at the Iziko National Gallery, the Megalo International Print Prize 2020, Kingston, Australia, Black Luminosity (2021) a group exhibition curated by Gcotyelwa Mashiqa at SMAC Gallery in Stellenbosch and Between Strangers (2021) a group exhibition curated by Morné Visagie at Nuweland Gallery in Oosterzee-Buren, The Netherlands.

Conradie’s work is held in several private and public collections such as the Leridon Collection, France and GAUTREAUX Collection, Cansas City.