The Brooklyn Rail

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.  

An intimate selection of paintings and drawings spanning eighteen years of Rhodes’s career is on view in Sites at Alison Jacques gallery, London. The affinities between di Paolo’s Renaissance landscape and Rhodes’s work are many. Both employ a restrained palette of greens, greys, and pinks on prepared panels, an egalitarian compositional awareness, and a love for the periphery where human intervention meets natural formation. Rhodes’s dark grey painting and corresponding drawing Hillside (2009) could be a closer view of di Paolo’s trees, seen from above. 

The studio ephemera included in Sites illumines Rhodes’s meticulous relationship to her source material and commitment to the techne of painting: postcards of Sienese, early Renaissance, and Indian miniature paintings; a book open to a photograph of the shingle foreland at Dungeness; handwritten notes on pigments and vocabulary used in her work. Rhodes was born in Edinburgh in 1959, but she grew up in India until age fourteen. Her parents were leftist Christian missionaries in Serampore. After returning to England and later moving to Scotland, she graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1982. Her mature work began after a ten-year period of political organizing. From 1992 until 2016 when she could no longer paint due to motor neurone disease, Rhodes refined a practice that tarried with painting’s ability to complicate the shifting ground of what we think we see when we remember landscape. For Rhodes, remembrance is always implied within the act of looking.

In a 1998 interview with Pat Fisher, Rhodes described her process as working from an intuitive core idea, which determined the “tiny portions” of shapes and imagery she culled from a “huge array of different photographs.” Her sources came from geography books, photos she took from a small plane or helicopter, and oblique views of industrial sites, gas stations, and geological formations. Bits of these images were then composed in pencil drawings, four of which are shown in Sites. It wasn’t until late in her career that Rhodes conceived of the drawings as works in themselves. They were functional cartoons that provided a skeleton for the skin of the painting. Rhodes worked wet-on-wet, in single layers, which gives her work an illusion of spontaneity. In actuality, every aspect of the compositions was controlled through the drawings, allowing Rhodes to work out multiple viewpoints within one image to achieve the unsettling perspective of the wounded aerial.  

Rhodes described the sensation of seeing from above as witnessing that which has already happened. This suffuses the paintings with loss. There are connections between this longing and Rhodes’s personal alienation from India as the landscape of her childhood. In a broader sense, the loss speaks to a feeling of solastalgia, a sense of living in and through an environment undergoing climate crises and the collapse of global capitalism. Although her “portraits of landscapes,” as Rhodes called them, are fictional, they mediate real places. Remnants of the military industrial complex, histories of pacifist resistance, and the trace of labor surface in her sites both in stages of dereliction and construction. Headland (2001) is a rendering of the reference photo from Dungeness, a shale cuspate foreland that is also the site of a nuclear power station.  

When Rhodes was active in radical politics, she visited and protested at the Women’s Peace Camp at RAF Greenham Common, a US operated military base that stored nuclear missiles in the eighties. Rhodes was also active at the nuclear storage and naval base at Faslane, where she and other protesters were carted off by authorities. Greenham Common, when viewed from above, is a long rectangular stretch of green carved out by grey pathways. Grass covered bunkers swell up along the edge like Rhodes’s bulbous forms in Deposits (2009).  

If Rhodes is a painter of the periphery—the corners of a landscape you see passing through a car window—then these physical sites of state violence form the periphery to her paintings. Her attention to these “shadow places,” both in life as in work, pushes the truth of her fictions into focus.