The Hanging Gardens of Babylon: Christopher Horder

Christopher Horder’s paintings begin with a surrender to matter. Water is worked into linen, pigment released across the surface and left to move according to its own logic. As the water evaporates, the marks slowly gather and settle. The process is repeated again: soak, stain, dry, layer. Later, he introduces oil paint, bringing another kind of agency through dragging, glazing, and removing.

He describes this as an attempt to “paint the space between” things. His paintings might suggest flowers, geological forms, wings, cells or even fragments of landscape, but they never resolve into any one thing. Recognition flickers and disappears. What remains is a sense of something forming: matter gathering, dividing, and constantly drifting towards itself. Horder is preoccupied with the distance between the world and the systems we use to describe it. We name something and believe we know it: we classify it, understand its properties, place it within our system of understanding. But naming is not the same as knowing. Some things can disappear from language entirely, and still remain in our mythos. 

Horder’s recent reading of Gnosticism, mythology and other forms of marginalised knowledge act as entry points into these paintings. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, for instance, hold particular significance precisely because of their surrounding uncertainty. Described by ancient writers as a vast, terraced garden rising above the dry landscape of Babylon, they were said to have been built by a king for his homesick wife, recreating the green mountains of her homeland in the heart of Mesopotamia. Yet, no conclusive archaeological evidence has ever established that the gardens existed at all. They endure instead as a kind of cultural mirage: a monument surviving for more than two millennia held immortal through the trace of its existence. 

A legendary garden survives as an image carried through language and memory, and Horder’s paintings work in a similar register. They are accumulations of trace: of water, pigment, gravity, time, and attention. Their surfaces record events that cannot be entirely reconstructed. Each layer partially obscures what came before while remaining inseparable from it.