Strijdom van der Merwe: Drawing with Nature, Speaking Without Words

Strijdom van der Merwe is a South African land artist whose work exists somewhere between sculpture, drawing, and poetry. He does not paint on canvas or carve marble. Instead, he walks into the land with simple tools: stones, sticks, leaves, sand, and arranges what he finds into geometric shapes and patterns. His artworks are not made to last. The wind will blow them away. Rain will wash them out. Time will erase them. And that's precisely the point.

Born in 1961 in Worcester, in the Western Cape, Van der Merwe trained in fine art, graphic design, and sculpture. He studied not only in South Africa but also in the UK, the Netherlands, and Korea. But despite his global exposure, his work remains rooted in the South African landscape. He doesn't use nature as a backdrop; he uses it as the material itself. "I don't take anything into the landscape," he says. "I work with what I find. The landscape gives me everything I need."

That idea of working with nature, not against it, is central to understanding his art.

Van der Merwe is often compared to land artists like Andy Goldsworthy, the British artist known for creating delicate patterns from leaves or ice. Both artists share a deep respect for the natural world and a desire to work in silence. But Van der Merwe's work carries a different weight. It comes from a country marked by deep scars, colonial violence, apartheid, land theft, and environmental loss. In this context, his careful arrangements of stone and stick are not just aesthetic. They are meditations on land, history, and presence.

Critically, this is where Van der Merwe's work becomes more than beautiful. It becomes political in a quiet way. He does not shout. He does not protest. But by walking into a damaged landscape and listening to it, by touching the ground with care, he reminds us of how disconnected we have become. "You can't force the landscape," he says. "You must work with its rhythms." That rhythm, once broken by conquest and capitalism, is something he tries to restore.

His artworks are ephemeral, but they are also disciplined. He often works in circles, spirals, and lines. In one piece, he arranged red sand in the shape of a perfect square across a riverbed. In another, he placed stones in a wide spiral across a dry field. These forms contrast with the chaos of the natural setting. They interrupt it gently. They create balance. But they also ask: what belongs, and what does not?

Unlike traditional sculpture, Van der Merwe's work resists ownership. You can't take it home. You can't hang it on a wall. You can only experience it, often briefly. This resistance makes his work radical. In a world obsessed with profit and permanence, he embraces loss. "The artwork disappears," he says, "but the memory remains." That memory is the real artwork.

But his practice is not without problems. Critics have raised important questions about his relationship to land, especially in a South African context. As a white artist working with the land, is he re-enacting colonial gestures? Is his presence a form of control, even if his intentions are peaceful? These are challenging but necessary questions. Van der Merwe rarely addresses them directly. He prefers metaphor to confrontation. Yet the questions remain, because land in South Africa is never neutral. It is history, territory, trauma.

One could argue that Van der Merwe's art walks a fine line between harmony and erasure. On one hand, he pays deep attention to nature. He avoids waste, avoids machinery, and avoids disruption. On the other hand, the quietness of his work may also silence more complex truths. Where are the people in his landscapes? Where are the stories of forced removal, of environmental injustice, of climate collapse? His art is a whisper, but sometimes we need a shout.

Still, his influence is hard to ignore. Van der Merwe has worked across the globe in Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Americas. He has been invited to international land art symposia, created large-scale works for sculpture parks, and even designed memorial spaces in public areas. His works have been featured in major exhibitions, and his photographs, often the only lasting record of his pieces, are widely collected.

In South Africa, he co-founded the Site-Specific Land Art Biennale, a festival that brings artists together to create temporary works in nature. The idea is simple: go to a place, live in it, and respond with art. This event has helped create a new generation of South African land artists who also engage with place, environment, and time. In this way, Van der Merwe is not just an artist. He is a teacher, a guide, a collaborator.

His style is minimal, but his ideas are big. He speaks of balance, of breath, of silence. In one of his most striking works, he placed a series of white stones in a long line over the spine of a sand dune. It looked like a stitch-in-healing act. It seemed to say, This place has been torn, but we can mend it.

Yet even this idea of mending can be controversial. Who decides what needs healing? Who gets to do the stitching? In a country where the land still bears deep racial and economic divides, art that seeks peace can also be accused of ignoring pain. Van der Merwe's silencehis resistance to text, to explanation, to explicit politics feels both refreshing and frustrating.

Unlike political artists like Brett Murray or Ayanda Mabulu, who use satire and outrage, Van der Merwe chooses calm. But calm is not always enough. His work is meditative, but it risks becoming detached. His landscapes are beautiful, but they may also erase the people who have lived and fought on them. The challenge for Van der Merwe is not in the making's in the meaning.

Even so, his commitment to a low-impact, high-attention practice is valuable. In a time of environmental emergency, his art reminds us to slow down. To notice. To touch the world gently. He invites us to step out of our cities and phones and profit-driven logic, and to walk, barefoot if possible, into a field. To see a stone not as an object, but as a message.

The Bottom Line 

Strijdom van der Merwe's art is temporary, but it leaves a mark. He draws with nature instead of ink. He builds with silence instead of noise. His works are fragile, but they speak of deep care. They remind us that land is not a blank canvas but a memory, a scar, a home.

But this quiet beauty also carries risk. In a country shaped by violence and inequality, silence can feel like avoidance. Van der Merwe's challenge is not technical work is already masterful. His challenge is ethical. How can he bring more voices into his landscapes? How can he acknowledge the complex, painful histories beneath his feet?

For now, his art walks that delicate line between beauty and blindness, between harmony and history. And in that tension lies its most incredible truth.