Literature

Hanging Gardens proceeds from a childhood vision - literally a recurring dream - and builds from it an iconographic system of startling coherence. Working in oil on canvas, Randa Maddah repurposes the compositional vocabulary of Baroque narrative painting and Flemish miniature, filtered through the manuscript traditions of Islamic art, to produce images that occupy an intermediate register, close to cosmological diagram. Hybrid creatures - part human, part bird, part plant - drift through layered, densely worked pictorial space in which trees, flowers and figures refuse fixed hierarchies. The circle recurs as a structuring form, encoding simultaneously the cyclical logic of reincarnation and the visual grammar of the mandala; beginnings and endings rendered indistinguishable. The influence of Bruegel - both Elder and Younger - is legible in the teeming, horizontal distribution of incident across the picture plane, while the chromatic intensity and gilded light recall the devotional economies of icon painting.

The series operates on two registers. On one level, it is a private mythology, rooted in the Golan Heights and the particular psychic landscape of a childhood spent negotiating political violence and displacement - nature as refuge, the garden as the mind's answer to fear it cannot otherwise process. On another, it reaches toward a universal animism, drawing on the concept of anthropomorphic thinking as theorised in relation to primitive consciousness: the belief that matter is merely the garment of the spirit, that natural phenomena are inhabited, communicative, alive. Maddah's hybrid figures reveal materialised emotional states, existing in the liminal space between life and death, ecstasy and futility, rootedness and flight. The work of Dante, Borges and Rumi leaves its trace, offering a sense that the visible world is always also an allegory for something the visible world cannot quite contain.