The Millinery Works Art Gallery

CURRENT exhibition

INTERIORS paintings 1982 - 2007 by Eric Rimmington                                  page 2

Robbe-Grillet argued that `the writer should content himself with the impersonal description of physical objects. Psychological or ideological analysis should be excluded - the reader must guess what hides under details and events.’  It’s a good description of Rimmington’s method.  Take the empty cooking oil tin in Looking East, Looking West, Looking East: it is green and white, the national colours of Pakistan, and the text is in Arabic.  The tin is reflected in a mirror propped up in the bay window.  The synthetic shade of green on the tin is a little outside his visual comfort zone, but rather than looking for similar common or garish objects, he placed it against a sliver of pink and white streetscape and a soft evening sky.  London’s changing population, its culture and cuisine, is reflected in this juxtaposition. 

The Black Stuff in 1984 was painted in the year of the miners’ strike.  The lump of coal was purchased from a Hackney coal merchant’s yard and placed on a photograph of Sir Ian McGregor in a newspaper report of his union-breaking tactics in the United States.  McGregor was appointed Chairman of the Coal Board in 1983, after bringing British Steel to its knees, and was using the same tactics in the rationalisation of the coal industry, at the expense of thousands of jobs.  The coal has shed dust all over the newspaper as if symbolically blacking his reputation. 

Then there is the bulging black plastic sack, grotesque and mysterious, squatting on a white tablecloth against a silvery grey wall, also painted virtually in monochrome.  Why has it been dignified in this way?  Why have the contents of the street been brought into the house, threatening its sanctity?  It’s anyone’s guess, but Rimmington isn’t interested in satisfying our expectations.  He is just as likely to pick up a Hackney Council refuse sack as its visual opposite, a clean white cotton sheet, and drape it over a wooden clothes horse or hang it on a piece of string fixed to the walls of the studio. 

The New Cotton Sheet (1985) was the first large work to be painted in his first floor studio and is virtually life-size.  The perspective makes the clothes horse look as though it might topple forwards under the weight of the sheet.  Bought specifically to paint, its fresh, unused quality connected perhaps to the relative newness of the studio in 1985, when the floor and wall were much less abraded than they are now.  
 

Next page

Previous Exhibitions

Return to Front Page