Exhibition of thirteen paintings by Stephanie Radok at Hahndorf Academy, February 6 – March 22, 2026.
The paintings are acrylic paint on unstretched canvas and include fragments of mica.
The shimmering trees stand in front of distant horizons of hills and cliffs and shores as seen from a ship at sea. They are loosely based on coastal profiles of South Australia as drawn by William Westall who was on board HMS Investigator with Matthew Flinders in 1802. The portraits of trees are from the artist’s garden. The paintings ask the viewer to slow down and breathe deeply, letting their eyes travel into the distance while also observing what is nearby.
This work was first exhibited at the historic Museum of Economic Botany in the Adelaide Botanic Gardens in 2021. It draws together words and herbs, plants and voices, speaking the unspoken, opening up emotions and thoughts that often remain hidden.
It was acquired by the Art Gallery of South Australia and shown in the first gallery of the Elder wing in 2024-2025.
In August 2023 Stephanie Radok’s Tree Stories exhibition, was held at Urrbrae House on the Waite Campus of Adelaide University. The artworks responded to the Waite Arboretum, its trees, its ambience, and its sense of history. It is an experience with many layers.
The exhibition included five paintings, six woodcuts, an illuminated book of the last page of Patrick White’s novel The Tree of Man shown in the Drawing Room, while a Book Collection and Book Fossils as well as etchings made in 2008 were shown in the Arboretum Exhibition Room.
Stephanie Radok, from Pages from a 21st Century Herbal
Exhibition at the Museum of Economic Botany in the Adelaide Botanic Gardens
Medicinal Plant Tales: everyday stories
an apple a day keeps the doctor away
The use of plants for health and wellbeing is deep rooted in our history. From the earliest times our need for food, fibre and medicine has been based upon the plant world and yet today the link between plants and medicine is often overlooked.
The Santos Museum of Economic Botany, situated at the heart of the Adelaide Botanic Garden, has been amplifying such links and plant stories since 1881. Here one can learn and reflect on the diversity and complexity of cultures and their relationships to plants all over the world.
The Museum is full of tales of colonisation, trade, culture, ingenuity, tradition, innovation, art and curiosity. Among the many plants whose stories are on display are medicinal ones. They possess healing and economic value as well as historic and emotional dimensions.
Contemplating them is a path to remembering your own stories. Most of us have favourite and regular encounters with medicinal plants – Cinchona plants, whose bark is responsible for producing quinine, an antimalarial drug also found in tonic water; or Mentha pipertia (peppermint) that has been used as a digestive for centuries. Then there are the everyday encounters with eucalyptus, turmeric, camomile, aloe vera, echinacea, calendula, ginger, garlic, olive oil, and rosemary.
Australia has its own medicinal plant history. There are First Nations’ traditions and knowledge from centuries of learning and developing the uses of indigenous plants for healing. Then there are the colonisers, settlers, migrants and refugees bringing with them their traditional remedies and plants, and learning how to appreciate local ones.
The artworks in Medicinal Plant Tales focus on the reparative gentle healing properties of medicinal plants and gardens and acknowledges the many stories that link plants, people and health.
Stephanie Radok, installation in Museum in progress
Pages from a 21st Century Herbal artist’s statement
A herbal is a book containing the names and descriptions of plants, specifically their medicinal, culinary and toxic properties. Early herbals from Egypt, India, China and Europe, were handwritten and often accompanied by drawings or paintings.
The first book on herbal medicine that I read was Dorothy Hall’s Herb Tea Book published in 1980. Hall was, in many ways, a pioneer of herbal medicine in Australia. She taught and influenced many of today’s practitioners. Her combination of common sense, humour and knowledge makes her books true manuals for life. They are encouraging, illuminating, practical and down to earth. Her obituary from 2012 states: “The practitioner of the garden and the hedgerows, and the waste lands and the bush was the keeper of the old ways, the old knowledge, the ancient wisdoms, the elder, the sage.”
For Pages from a 21st Century Herbal I looked at images of herbs in various books and painted them in sanguine (blood-red) ink on fine paper. While the ink was still wet I wrote in blue ink directly from my thoughts, a kind of automatic writing, over the plant. The words are not all legible and suggest hidden wisdom and rich silences.
Artwork depicting derelict public service announcements from an imagined future of a world run by Australian animals painted on the back of old paintings.
Inspired by Centrelink’s assertion about language. And thoughts of extinction.
Stephanie Radok 