Strange Cartographies: the Paintings of Carol Rhodes
Carrie Foulkes, The Kelvingrove Review
October 2022
I first encountered the work of Scottish painter Carol Rhodes (1959 – 2018) at the London gallery, Alison Jacques in May 2021. It was a sunny afternoon, not long after the easing of the latest lockdown, and I was freely roaming the city for the first time in ages. For me, Carol Rhodes’ work will be forever associated with this era, a time characterised by an ongoing global pandemic and my gradual adjustment to a changed world after a devastating loss. The artist paints fictitious scenes, fusions of industrial and natural terrains, and her solo show at Alison Jacques moved and intrigued me. Her oil paintings often lack a horizon line, her forms veer towards abstraction and the colours of her landscapes are quite unlike those of the living world - purples and pinks, pastels, shades of grey. They are not wholly unnatural, sometimes they are almost bodily - the roads and runways can be read metaphorically as 1 wounds. There’s no trace of those figures that made the incisions, blasted the rocky ground with dynamite, forcing entry, paving over soil and sand. There is a sense of ambiguity and disorientation in her work that chimes with my experiences of bereavement and lockdown isolation. […]