Wrote a essay to accompany Mapping Landscapes at Stoppenbach & Delestre.
'...Rhodes’ pictures represent an increasingly ‘connected’ idea of landscape and how one place exists in relation to another – matched by an increasing sense of personal disconnect from the environments we transit through. It’s a conception of landscape apparently very far away from the secluded enclosure of Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot’s wonderfully titled Le Chemin montant sous les arbres à Ville-d’Avray/The Path going up under the trees at Ville-d’Avray (c.1870-1875). It’s a picture in which the world appears to be fully known and understood, a world of bringing firewood from the forest to the house (what could be an old man with a walking stick suggests a lifetime of the same comings and goings). And yet Corot is enigmatic. The picture is suspended and eternal but also volatile and shifting. Agitated. House and boat sit next to one another in the distance – two tiny triangles with very different meanings. It could all change with the wind, or a swipe of the hand, or the viewer’s mood. In some ways it’s a world just as baffling as Rhodes’ (surely ‘the path going up under the trees’ could be an equally fitting title for her Forest and Road?). As with most great landscape painting, Le Chemin montant sous les arbres à Ville-d’Avray is as much about mapping the shifting terrain of human consciousness as it’s about picturing the environment through which it passes.'
('Up Under the Trees': Mapping the Map)
...
