Hannelie Warrington-Coetzee (b. 1971, South Africa) is a Johannesburg-based South African visual artist and honorary research fellow at the Global Change Institute (WITS University). Her relational practice regularly centers on public shared spaces and landscapes, where she produces ephemeral to permanent interventions. Originating out of her respect and concern for the environment, Coetzee employs nature-based solutions, most often built with nature and out of reclaimed industrial waste. This forms unlikely partnerships, including with the surrounding land. Research into how nature functions and the novel innovations it holds in 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 or audience and locate meaning inherent to the materials used, and thus connecting the participants 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.
She has been invited to many arts and science engagements in public spaces, galleries, sculpture parks, art residencies, and informal pop-ups. Her most recent solo exhibition In mid-loping gait was well received in the USA in 2023 with an ongoing series of queer creature drawings. She was a Rupert Foundation, Social Impact Art Prize recipient in 2022 with A Still Life and a Claire and Eduardo Villa grantee in 2016 for Glistening Damselfly. She has several artists in residences and art-science workshops lined up around the world in 2024 and 2025, paired with exhibitions contextualizing the work visually.
Both her commissioned and self-initiated projects aim to create co-learning and co-problem-solving opportunities with a site-responsive approach. Collaborations and partnerships in the past included: environmental and social scientists, the natural world cultural workers, hydro engineers, technologists, city management, national parks, business people, humans, and non-humans. Most recently she completed the ART AND LITTER TRAPS project titled Alexandra River Creature Series (2025) SUNCASA – Enhancing Urban Climate Adaptation in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Jukskei River is the key partner and the Alexandra Water Warriors is the local partner.
Could You Briefly Explain The Driving Force/Motivation Behind Your Work?
What drives me to make work is to make sense of life while treading lightly on earth. I want to make sure that my works are used and useful and not sitting in storerooms. So when I make new works I make sure I know how they will be on earth after I leave.
Where/How Has Your Work Engaged With Systems Or Transformative Change-Making?
An extract from my MSc
“.. expressions of art-based praxis and transdisciplinary theory are not easy to undertake and implement. The process of praxis and design takes time, sometimes years, to learn and know something from doing it. Transgressive disruptive action (Vogel and O’Brien, 2021), through transdisciplinary learning in praxis, is also required for significant sustainable transformations to emerge (Lotz-Sisitka et al., 2016). Climate action is more urgent now than in the previous assessment. (IPCC 2022a; 2022b). I also argue that contemporary eco-art, produced transversely, innovatively, and effectively can take the form of new knowledge rooted in complexity. Using a conceptual interpretive framework, I build an argument of how eco-arts can strategically and comprehensively contribute to addressing “wicked problems” such as climate change in ways that serve humanity (Davis et al., 2015; Hawkins et al., 2015; Pigott, 2020). (Pg. 15 Warrington-COetzee 2022)
How Can The Transformations Community Support Your Work?
“.. expressions of art-based praxis and transdisciplinary theory are not easy to undertake and implement. The process of praxis and design takes time, sometimes years, to learn and know something from doing it. Transgressive disruptive action (Vogel and O’Brien, 2021), through transdisciplinary learning in praxis, is also required for significant sustainable transformations to emerge (Lotz-Sisitka et al., 2016). Climate action is more urgent now than in the previous assessment. (IPCC 2022a; 2022b). I also argue that contemporary eco-art, produced transversely, innovatively, and effectively can take the form of new knowledge rooted in complexity. Using a conceptual interpretive framework, I build an argument of how eco-arts can strategically and comprehensively contribute to addressing “wicked problems” such as climate change in ways that serve humanity (Davis et al., 2015; Hawkins et al., 2015; Pigott, 2020). (Pg. 15 Warrington-COetzee 2022)
