Carol Rhodes

Carol Rhodes was awarded a travelling scholarship and residency by Edinburgh Printmakers and the British Council in 2013-14 through a joint project with the Scottish Print Network called Below Another Sky.

This print was the main outcome of her residency during which she worked closely with studio printer Gillian Murray. She meticulously built up the print layer by layer over several months to achieve the subtle colour layering, printing in transparent glazes of inks.

The print is characteristic of her practice, depicting an empty, fictional, man-made landscape from an aerial viewpoint.

BIOGRAPHY

Carol Rhodes was born in Edinburgh and grew up in India. She studied at Glasgow School of Art. Before becoming a painter, Rhodes was a radical left-wing feminism activist. She organised many political events in Glasgow before becoming an artist.

Carol Rhodes worked closely with Edinburgh Printmakers to produce editions for the residence programme Below Another Sky 2013-14, a project funded by British Council to support artists to travel and make work.

The landscape paintings of Carol Rhodes depict fictional, apparently insignificant, man-made environments. Our viewpoint is usually an aerial perspective, so her eerie, distant worlds appear almost abstract. Her un-peopled compositions suggest spaces that are “on the edge”. We view coastal container ports, airports, anonymous offices or factory units. Her works can suggest bodily imagery in tangled roads or crevices of the landscape. Technology and surveillance are inferred through our viewpoint. Her imagery also calls to mind landscape models built by eighteenth-century painters. The artist might have encountered such miniatures during her childhood in India.

Rhodes’s unpeopled landscapes are invented. Her images are created from photographs and other sources. Rhodes worked slowly, usually with oil paint on board. Her works are small, smooth, densely worked and intense. Rhodes was a master of her craft. We understand her deep understanding of the medium through her disciplined and painstaking compositions. Her landscapes make and remake familiar worlds. They mark boundaries and they break them.

Rhodes stopped making work in 2015 after receiving a diagnosis of motor neuron disease. She passed in 2018. Rhodes work has been shown in Tate Britain, London; Vilma Gold, London; Brent Sikkema Gallery, New York and Angles Gallery, California.

Her works are in major collections including Tate, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut.