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The Millinery Works Art Gallery
CURRENT exhibition
INTERIORS paintings 1982 - 2007 by Eric Rimmington page 3
Another crumbling dark object appears in Das Klagende Lied (1988). A tin drum has almost rotted away from years of exposure on the roof of the artist’s house. Its poisonous state of decay seems to threaten the purity of the water-filled bowl beside it, in which an electric light is reflected. Rimmington saw a parallel here between the myth of `clean’ electricity from nuclear power (while nuclear waste rots in the ground) and the fairy tale on which Mahler’s cantata Das Klagende Lied (Song of Lamentation) is based. In the story, an elder brother kills the younger in order to marry a proud queen. But he accidentally leaves a bone as evidence of his crime. When turned into a flute by a minstrel and played, the bone recounts the murder to the elder brother and queen at their wedding. Wagnerian cataclysm ensues. The moral of the tale is that truth can lie dormant in inanimate objects, but will (eventually) out.
Six years later, another cotton sheet hangs on a line strung from one wall to another. `What I saw when I was…’ is a larger, grander painting, without the spatial distraction of the clothes horse. The sheet is almost parallel to the wall and after a while the large expanse of its wrinkled, un-ironed surface begins to look like a shroud. Inexplicably, there is a tiny lamp on the floor, the tea light casting a glow on the skirting board. Looking up, you notice two bits of paper pinned to the wall. Both lamp and papers are rendered insignificant by the size of the sheet, but nothing is in a Rimmington painting by accident. He likes these contrasts in scale. Although this is not discernible in the painting, one of the press cuttings concerns Boris Pasternak and the title of the painting is a quotation from something he said about the process of writing a poem, with which the artist identified. It is dated 11 January 1991, when the Gulf War was imminent.
The little lamp has appeared earlier in Cyprus Clay, painted in 1990. Three cheap ceramic objects have been placed directly on the floor, close to the skirting board. In the semi-darkness, the lamp casts a yellow pool of light. The winter of 1990 was one of dread as war drew closer in Kuwait. The Allied invasion would eventually take place on 17 January the following year. Rimmington, with his long memory of war, was deeply cast down by these events.