Carol Rhodes: The Deluge

The visual essay investigates Carol Rhodes’s complex relationship to landscape painting as it was left to her by artists such as John Constable, whose Boat-Building Near Flatford Mill (exhibited 1815) can be read alternatively as an image of construction or destruction, condemnation or rebirth. Boat-Building Near Flatford Mill could also be understood as an early industrial rethinking of the ‘deluge’ genre. Constable’s ark-like boat, strewn tools and transformed landscape subsequently become the wound-like chasm and scattered trees of Rhodes painting, Construction Site (2003). Both paintings question how we mark, shape or damage the world, but do so from very different perspectives (very differently gendered perspectives). The visual essay uses Nicholas Poussin’s Winter (The Deluge) (1660–64) and Winifred Knights’s The Deluge (1920) as visual landmarks with which to explore Rhodes’s unique contribution to the deluge genre: the forms and themes of which are reinvented in Construction Site (2003) with an ecological, feminist and distinctly ‘bodily’ consciousness.