Q&A: Christopher Horder

Can you talk me through The Hanging Gardens of Babylon reference? The title of your last show and works were centred around your own poetry and writing, but this feels like a different approach.

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon was just rolling around my head the entire time I was painting. It’s a little bit of weird sort of synergy that ties it all together for me. You know, there's actually no evidence of it ever existing. It's mentioned in two lines in this chiseled-out bit of clay. It was considered one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, and was said to have been created as a tribute to love, as the myth goes. 

The king’s wife came from another fertile land, and they were living in the middle of the desert. He said, “I’ll build an oasis for you here.” So it was an act of love. The mere fact that everyone who saw it was just like, this must be fable. There's this monument of beauty and irrigation and science, a homage to love, which has never been seen, never been witnessed. It lives on in this sort of mythical way. The idea invoked so much for me, in terms of the reasoning behind all my poetics coming from this sort of unseen, unknowable, mythological miracle. I love the idea that the memory of things can grow across the history of our collective consciousness.

Are the show titles based on what you’ve recently been reading?

Yeah, I’ve been diving more deeply into Gnosticism. The Gnostic scriptures were found in 1945, or around then. When I discovered that they were originally all the parts of the Bible that the church ripped out because it didn't conform to the church's idea that you have to go through the church to get to heaven. Have you read VALIS by Philip K. Dick?

No, I haven’t! I definitely need to.

Yeah, you should. Dick was a Gnostic as well. But for me it's sort of like this whole… it's my access to my understanding of what's truly authentic and how I can be authentic in myself, as well as the beauty, you know what I mean, and the horror. Because in the Gnostic tradition, we’re fundamentally flawed, and the only way back to our true sense of self is creativity. The Gnostics put a massive amount of credence on creativity. And so it's not something you just absorb and just take on board. It's something you are involved in to create a way to set yourself free.

And so within that understanding, there's the illusion of everything. So my paintings are like… I look at them as an atomised version of reality. So, I’m not painting a palm, I’m searching for what lies beneath that, and how we interact, how everything around us is like—

Balancing?

Yeah, balancing in part of this vast intelligence system where our senses interact with the world. I’m trying to see through that. Not necessarily in some sort of holier-than-thou way, but in my own attempts to understand this world in its complexities. And to me, no matter how this world goes, it feels like there is something external to us that is so ancient, profound and beyond our comprehension. For example, the Gnostics might say that the table we’re sitting at doesn't actually exist. It’s actually the space between everything here. So I’m basically trying to paint the space between, but whilst capturing fleeting moments of what is making that space in between.

That feels incredibly existential though, don’t you think?

Absolutely. When I say that, I'm not conceptualising the words, if you know what I mean. And it's not like an existential nightmare that I live in. It's more of a rebellion against what we're told is true and how we see it—and, like I said, these works aren't necessarily meant to inspire people to think like that. I want them to engage with the works for exactly what the works are, how they make them feel.

Do you feel like as you change and develop, the artworks are changing and developing in response, too?

The artwork never changes. It's every individual interaction with that. And also every individual reaction to that. You go back and see a painting at different stages of your life…. I guess the artwork is the anchor and everything else is moving around. Art is like almost a rebellion against our mortality. For me, art is my way of remembering the world, my way of remembering my life and my engagement with life in that moment.

Does this step towards trying to understand your place in the world feel similar to how you approached things in the past, or is this different?

This is different in the fact that I've been able to, through a few material breakthroughs, make a mark and take it off the surface because of that waxy layer. I put it on and layer this medium now, and it’s given the works a whole new surface, and sort of brought the paint up in a way that allows for another layer of painting. When I paint now, it becomes a glaze, and I'm able to achieve a bit more of my dark-layer glazing effects because of it.

The process is still similar in the sense that you're wetting and hand-dyeing the linen with watercolour and Indian Ink. I know that originally you were doing that in your Mum's driveway. Where are you doing it now?

These are actually all linen from a single dedicated moment last summer.

You managed to create every single piece of linen for this show last summer?

Yeah. I had to wait for it to get really, really hot, so that the water was able to evaporate through the linen.

You’re serious? That still blows my mind.

It's what makes the molecules kind of shift. But honestly, I don’t always need the heat. I’ve done them in the dead of winter in Berlin. But Mum's driveway offered a real sort of sped-up process where I could get lots of work done because it dried so quickly.

That’s wild.

In the dungeon studio on Regent Street, it takes almost 24 hours for it to dry.

Seriously? And then how long did it take to dry at your Mum’s?

Half an hour, maybe an hour?

That's crazy.

When I first do it, I can read the process by the sheen on the canvas. The sheen tells me how wet it is. And so when it's really wet, you add in the watercolour, and it moves with the water. And then as the water slows down, the marks slow down. So you're able to achieve those different stages. Then, once that's dried, I can soak it again. Nothing moves. It's embedded. I can do that process again and again. That's the layering process. To be fair, every now and then you lose one because the more you do it, the darker it gets. The ink just gets darker. That's what I love about the oil paint, that's when I can control the vision.

So, what’s the clear layer?

It's a medium, something to seal the raw canvas so that the oils don't eat through.

So that's different to the thin layer on top that was sealing it originally?

No, I was actually watering it down originally, whereas the surface now has a real slipperiness to it.

What I think you’ve successfully brought back this time is that, compared to painting directly on board, you’re cutting out the linen, mounting that on the panel, followed by the clear medium over the top, and then you add lighter pigment, finishing with the oil. It’s effectively a six step process.

It’s definitely complex. I do one layer of bond. And then I put this gel medium over the top, which gives an absolute separation. So whatever's underneath is completely untouched by this paint, and it just sits. But the whole point is, because I find the stains so beautiful in themselves, I don't want to detract from those. I want to be able to find a way to add to those. In response to a painting, I'll mix up a whole palette, but I rarely go into highlights. White is something that I bring to it right at the end. I spend the whole time putting on the paint so that you can't see it. I mean, it nicks into the surface, and then I build that up. But when you look at some of these paintings, you almost can't tell what's the stain and what's not. I'm able to paint a sky blue where there's a little bit of blue in the stain and accentuate that, and get more of a tonal dynamic. And then I can glaze that back to black, and then I can pull a highlight off the top of this section. So it's really like painting again.

Do you feel like there's a sense of freedom in that discovery—or in terms of what you've called it—a breakthrough?

That's what keeps me going. Discovering. There's the vision of your art and then there's the materiality of it. There's the vision in your mind and then there's the clumps of coloured mud that you have to transcribe this vision that you have. And so when you get these little glimpses of—I'll say infinity—but like these glimpses of absolute potential where you're like, "Oh my God, this is it—I’ve got it”. 

That must be so satisfying.

I always say that if you go deep and authentic with yourself with your work, then when other people see it, it resonates with them.

It absolutely does. Do you find that when you're approaching a particular work—I know you're saying that you name them obviously based on things you're reading—but are you going into them thinking of those things in particular, or is it after the point you're done that you decide to name them and give them titles?

Yeah, I think because I'm writing and reading all the way through it, it's not like I think those ideas are part of the subconscious permeating. The reason all the titles aren't necessarily an afterthought is because they’re a keyhole into helping people engage with the work and the ideas. I always ask myself, how does this engage with my artistic process? How does this engage with my vision of the world? How does that vision of the world fit in with reality? And how do I draw those bridges together? Because at the end of the day, it's just a colourful mess.

A beautiful mess.

Haha. But you know what I mean. When you engage with it in such a way where it's your life and you’ve imbued it with meaning because this isn't just for shits and giggles. There's something going on here that I need to personally be satisfied with. I need to know if there's something more.

I see your practice as more of an interrogation into the complexities of the medium. The scope, from watercolour to oil, is placed down on the one canvas. Do you feel like you apply your past painting history to how you paint now?

Yeah, for me it's kind of like one big cauldron. I mix it up like a witch!

You dance between the size of works. There's this brevity of movement in the large works. Sometimes the big ones feel slightly less complex. When you do a really small one, you might lay out more oil on the surface, building your mark-making. Is there a concise nature to the way that you approach your big ones, because quite often there's less on them?

Completely. So those little panel works, the palette knife is big. During the Panel show, I was like, "Oh, how am I going to do a little panel work?”, “I have to get a smaller palette knife." So I got a little palette knife. But then I took that smaller knife to the larger works, and that's given me a scale of mark which has changed the whole thing. There's a delicacy to them now.

In the large works, your response to the stain looks like you’re able to let the stain breathe. Whereas when you approach the small ones—because you're effectively working within this size constraint—the response to that size is to build up more oil, as if every piece of stain has an interpreting arm or a branch that's veering off it. And you're seeing that and kind of moving into that. Are the small works more layered, or are you more heavy-handed in the way that you've applied the paint?

The thing is, when you've got a stain and nothing's on it, the longest part of the process is going, “how do I do this?“. You just don't stick a blob down willy-nilly. And you have to find that keyhole into it. You need to make a mark like that.

How do you manage to get your paint to move no matter the size of the canvas?

You start building the clumps of matter, like in Flowers of Rust, and the paint just gets drawn to itself. It’s like building the universe again—two little clumps of matter come together, those two gravitate to the next, so then there’s three, then six, and there's a clump over here of four, and that clump of four find another six, so it comes together. It gives the whole work a sense of justice. 

That's how raindrops form, you know, when you watch water running down a window pane.

Yeah. They all join onto each other. So every mark is considered. There's movement. And then from that, it changes your whole consideration for the next mark. Like I said, some of them need more, some need less. Some have less and need more, and you're unable to justify more sometimes. But I feel the stains have a downward gravity. There's gravity that sinks into the work, which is while it’s on the wall, and then there's gravity that's on top of that, when you’re down on the floor. And I think again that's part of the knitting process of two stages that, if you get any of those wrong, it doesn't work. Mismatched ideas.

And you do them all on the ground?

I start on the ground, so gravity's doing that. Then I put them up on the wall. There's a whole new direction—now you're looking at that gravity there. So, you're over there, and then you're here, and I've got rags and brushes out and my hands are moving together—

Do you ever paint with both hands? Do you paint with your left and your right hands?

I'm mostly left-handed, like 90% left hand.

Do you actually ever let your right hand do any of the mark-making with the rag?

Yeah, with the rag specifically. With the timing of the stain, there's a timing with the glazing as well, where it's really slippery and you can move it around, and then it slowly dries and parts of it collapse and run. So I like to go back and fix that up if I don't like the effect.

Is there anything you want people to understand better about your works that you haven't been able to explain to anyone? Anything that you feel like no one's ever asked you about your practice, or something you want to clarify?

That’s a really interesting question because I do like the works to speak for themselves and to have a certain amount of—I'm not trying to be secret with you or something, but there's a mysterious business behind it, which is mysterious to me. I just see it as an authentic dedication to an inquiry that sort of isn't for commercial art. I never stop painting, and I never stop thinking about it. It's just been with me since I was a kid. But also, this is the situation I'm in—this is my livelihood.

But I guess, in response to that question? I think these paintings are actually part of the natural world. They're not separate from it. It's not a painting of something. It's a painting from something that's been deeply entwined in the fabric of my being, and what I feel is, for me, an authentic response to this world. I think that I'm lucky—completely lucky. I know that if I keep on this trajectory, I will achieve the kind of painting that's in my head that I want to achieve—and it's a very personal thing.

Nature versus nurture?

Well a lot of people come up to me and say, "I love the pinks and blues." And you're like, "Oh, that's very sweet. Thank you.” But every now and then you meet someone and they just—their language and what they say to you is like—”Oh my God." You articulated what I was doing. I was doing it in paint and you articulated it back to me in words.

I don't think artists are necessarily the best person to talk about their work. It's like a surgeon. What they're doing is delicate, but they're chopping up little bits of meat. They're breaking bones. They're cutting you up with a chicken knife. But the end result of what they do is life. They make you better. Whereas being an artist, you're basically a giant five-year-old at a studio playing in the mud. It’s the weirdest way to live. But the accumulation of that whole process ends up in something really timeless and magical and haunting. 

I feel sorry for people who have to work in little blue offices and under fluorescent white daylight globes or for eight hours a day on their feet. But there's a reprieve from day-to-day life when you get to make art. And I guess that's why I connect so hard with all that Gnostic stuff and the physics of nature—that’s really what's going on. When you get touched by sadness or loss or love, your world can be either made or destroyed in a second. And for me, art is the way that I process all of that.

That’s poetic.

And writing and reading too of course.

Yeah, me too.

You know, you should ask that question all the time. You should ask everyone that. I think sometimes everybody asks the most generic fucking questions. And it's—and you almost get used to it. You have to do a little song and dance. They say, "What are your works about?" And I say, "Oh, they're nature-inspired abstracts." Which in essence they are.

But they’re not really. In essence.

No. Not really. Like… I love traditional art. I'm drawn to that. I love the knowledge and craft and the talent and the dedication to rendering something beautiful. But for me it's not my temperament. You have to paint according to your temperament. Your temperament is what drives you. And so it feels like putting a square peg in a round hole. You've got to go, what's my—not skill set, but what's my attitude? What's my energy? What's my patience? And what do I want to achieve? 

If your work is honouring all those things, is that authentic to you?

Well, you get to the end of a show like this—and you're just like, all of this is just evidence of an inquiry. It’s what’s been left in my wake. These are the ripples and the sort of flickers and glimpses that I'll take to the next level. There's stuff in this show that will fall away. There's stuff that will carry on. In that sort of trajectory, my whole art career has been shedding and rebuilding and exploring something new. And then there's a lot of dead ends sometimes, too. It’s refreshing to say, "Oh, actually, that was just a stepping stone to the next big discovery.”

I can’t wait. That’s brilliant Chris, thank you.

Thank you! Now let’s get another coffee.