Carol Rhodes

Alison Jacques presents Sites, a solo exhibition of work by the Scottish artist Carol Rhodes (b.1959; d.2018). Spanning nearly 20 years, many of the exhibited works have never been seen in London. In 1994, Rhodes began a body of highly distinctive paintings, which she proceeded to develop over two decades, until motor neurone disease made it finally impossible for her to paint and draw. Since her death in 2018, the significance of these works has been increasingly recognised. Drawing on recent research in her archive, this exhibition sets up specific pairings of paintings and drawings dating from 1995 to 2014 to illustrate the richness, specificity and psychological depth of her practice. This exhibition runs parallel to Rhodes participating in A Living Collection, The Hepworth Wakefield and Fake Barn Country, Raven Row, London.

Rhodes’s paintings are aerial views of fictional, post-industrial edge-lands; land interrupted by excavations, depots, industrial units, motorways and business parks, and sometimes bordered by the sea. Rhodes described her subject matter as being ‘in-between places’ and ‘non-places’ – places without history that were normally disregarded or hidden. The aerial viewpoint she employed was not, however, merely a formal device; it had very personal resonances.

One of the first exhibitions to bring wider attention to Rhodes’s work was titled 'The Persistence of Painting' (CCA, Glasgow, 1995). Painting has always persisted and Rhodes’s sense of that, and her contribution to its continuity, reminds us that the only landscapes we have – the only reality – are that which we ourselves create.