Reaching the Stuff Itself: The Delicate Empiricism of Carol Rhodes

Carol Rhodes’s practice will be approached through Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s delicate empiricism or zarte Empirie. Entailing an approach that encompassed ‘prolonged emphatic looking and seeing grounded in direct experience’, the article will consider the particularity of the artist’s own methodologies. As such, whilst Goethe’s own way of knowing has certain parallels with phenomenology, the article will explore the various points of imbrication between what Moira Jeffrey claims was the artist’s attempt to ‘produce a kind of painting that is open and empathetic, alert to the clamour and conundrums of the outside world’ and the delicate empiricism as set out by Goethe.