At Graham Beck, a new long-term creative project, the Artist’s Retreat, invites leading artists to work not simply on the estate, but with it.
Rooted in the limestone soil, the silences and the particular sense of time that defines this part of the Western Cape’s Breede River Valley, the initiative is conceived as an ongoing dialogue between place and practice.
The first artist invited into this conversation, Michael Chandler, has set a quietly confident tone.
There is something disarming about driving two hours from Cape Town and arriving not at a gallery, not at a white cube studio space but at a sweep of vineyards and pale hills where the only real instruction is to pay attention.
“This is not a place that wants to be rushed,” says Chandler. “This is a project that requires you to be quiet, to look, to really see. You need to pay attention. The land will tell you what to do.”
Chandler’s canvas was a ceramic wine egg, one of the sculptural fermentation vessels used in the Graham Beck cellar. His pigments came not from a studio but from the land itself.
“I wanted the piece to be made of the place, not just about it,” he explains. “So I started by walking, collecting, digging. The limestone is the fine silt sandstone you can crumble in your hands. You begin to realise that colour is already everywhere. You just have to release it.”
Graham Beck stretches across some 3,000ha of limestone-rich terrain and protected nature reserve. For winemakers, this geology is fundamental. For Chandler, it became the starting point of the work. He ground the soil into fine powders and refined them into delicate pigments, building a palette that was, quite literally, Robertson in colour.
“Working like this changes your sense of time,” he says. “You cannot fake it. You cannot hurry it. There is a discipline to waiting for the material to tell you what it can do.”
The choice of the ceramic wine egg was deliberate. These vessels are prized for their quiet influence on wine, encouraging natural circulation and gentle oxygen exchange without imposing flavour. They are tools of function but also objects of unexpected beauty.
“They already feel like sculptures,” Chandler says. “They have a presence. Painting on one felt like a conversation rather than a decoration.”
He worked outdoors, letting light, wind, and temperature guide his hand.
“There was a moment towards the end of the day when the sun started dropping and everything shifted,” he recalls. “You stop making decisions and start responding instead.”
As the work developed, forms drawn from the immediate landscape, geological textures and subtle echoes of the surrounding nature reserve found their way onto the surface. The finished piece feels both ancient and contemporary. Earth becomes colour. Colour becomes story. Story becomes vessel.
It now lives in Graham Beck’s Innovation Cellar, where it feels less like an artwork placed in a winery and more like something that belongs there. For Graham Beck, the Artist’s Retreat is not about commissioning objects for display. It is about building a framework in which craft, time, and attention matter.
“The most interesting thing about this process is that nothing is forced,” says Chandler. “You are working with what already exists, and that is incredibly liberating.”
Future artists will be invited to respond to the landscape in their own way. For now, Chandler’s ceramic egg stands as a marker of what can happen when a place is treated not as a backdrop, but as a collaborator.
“This land has a voice,” he says. “My job was simply to listen and to try not to get in the way.”
From the February 2026 issue of Wanted.
