Whatever happened to Silicon Glen? Carol Rhodes and the painting of ‘post-industrial stuff’

This article examines the landscape paintings of Scottish artist Carol Rhodes as a politically charged and formally inventive response to the political–economic reorganization of Scotland during the 1990s and 2000s. Drawing on archival research, studio notes and selected paintings in the National Galleries of Scotland collection, Rhodes’s transition from activist and organizer to painter of landscapes shaped by late-capitalist infrastructure and industry is explored. The study argues that Rhodes’s paintings both express and disrupt dominant spatial logics – foregrounding tensions between visibility and opacity characteristic of their disorientating historical moment. Engaging with critical perspectives from Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, David Harvey and Fredric Jameson, the article frames Rhodes’s paintings as acts of ‘complex seeing’ that mediate the socio-economic conditions of their time in revealing and instructive ways.