Open Ground – Carol Rhodes

VISUAL is pleased to present Open Ground, an exhibition of paintings and drawings by the late Scottish artist Carol Rhodes, selected in collaboration with the artist’s Estate. These works record the impact of industrial, extractive, and other man-made processes on what the artist called “landscape that is commonly disregarded”.

The exhibition is accompanied by an introductory text by Andrew Mummery.

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).

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.