VISUAL is pleased to present Open Ground, an exhibition of paintings and drawings by the late Scottish artist Carol Rhodes. These works look at what the artist called “landscape that is commonly disregarded” and include depictions of arterial roads, factories, airports, mines.

The places captured in these images are often hidden, unseen by a large part of the population, or passed through quickly on the way to somewhere else. These sites bear the traces of human progress, of technological and industrial development, and conversely can be read as ones of decay, damage, and potential danger.

Rhodes’s paintings and drawings are not straightforward documentary images; close looking reveals them to be devoid of humans and even vehicles, despite the prominence of roads. These images are instead meticulously constructed from varied sources, creating a composite of places once seen as essential or even embodying a vision of progress. Now, in an age of accelerating climate change, they can seem sinister or darkly prophetic.

These works bear Rhodes’s signature compositional move of taking an aerial view. Her explanation for this, taken from notes for a lecture to her students, morphs into a summary of her practice as a whole;

“The thing about being up high is that you can see a lot. The more terrain that is opened up for us to see, the easier it is to understand what happens below and so it gives us a feeling of security and control. But if you go too high, there is a line that, when crossed, changes that into an agoraphobic panic. I would like my pictures to be on that line….the line between security and unease.”

This exhibition has been realised with the kind cooperation of the artist’s Estate. An essay by the Estate’s curator Andrew Mummery accompanies this exhibition and is available in the gallery and online here.

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Carol Rhodes was born in Edinburgh in 1959. She spent her early childhood in Bengal, India, returning to the UK when she was 14 and later studying at Glasgow School of Art. After graduating in 1982 she stopped painting for nearly ten years focussing instead on social and political activism, including the anti-nuclear and women’s movements, and was a founder member of the Glasgow Free University. She started painting again in 1992 and her work began to be exhibited regularly from 1994. In 2013 she was diagnosed with motor neurone disease and died in 2018. A mid-career survey of Rhodes’s work was presented at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh in 2007. More recent institutional surveys have been presented at MAC Belfast (2017), Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow (2021), the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht (2023) and the Haus am Waldsee, Berlin (2024).

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Andrew Mummery is the curator of the Carol Rhodes Estate. He worked closely with Rhodes for nearly twenty years and exhibited her work regularly at the gallery that he ran in London from 1996 until 2014. Mummery is also a publisher of artist’s books and a freelance writer.