Carol Rhodes: Sites
Kate Brock, The Brooklyn Rail
July 2025
‘In one panel of Giovanni di Paolo’s 1454 Baptist Predella, a pink-clad Saint John the Baptist ascends a grey path into a density of crags. The rock formation looms above a patchwork green field dotted with tiny pink buildings. We’re looking at the outskirts, a medieval “shadow place” as philosopher Val Plumwood calls those sites of extraction which we’re not meant to see but that support social life. The painting is small; its proportions and perspective are invented. Ground, rock, and horizon are equally important. The result is a contained dizziness wherein multiple time scales are shown in one view. The Scottish painter Carol Rhodes (1959–2018) described this perspective—partly aerial but not straight from above—as seeing the landscape from the position of being wounded. It is a peculiar distance that she articulated in her small panel paintings of fictive edgelands and post-industrial landscapes.’ […]