Edith Rimmington and British Surrealism: War, Goddess Imagery and the Significance of the Ocean

The focus of this collaborative doctoral project will be the life and career of Edith Rimmington (1902-1986), a British artist whose work has been much neglected despite her significant contributions to Surrealism. Little is known about Rimmington's early life before 1936, when she visited the famous International Surrealist exhibition at the Burlington Galleries in London. By 1937 she was an established, if not formal, member of the British Surrealist Group and participated in the Surrealist Objects and Poems exhibition at the London Gallery that same year. Rimmington's work was also exhibited internationally, most notably at the Surrealist Exhibition in Paris in 1947 at the Galerie Maeght, which many academics in the field consider to be the last great Surrealist exhibition. Despite Rimmington's painting The Oneiroscopist (oil on canvas, 1947) becoming emblematic of the British Surrealist movement, major scholarly studies have yet to analyse her paintings, drawings, collage, poetry or automatic writing in any detail.



The research for this project will be object-based and archive-oriented and will make a case for Rimmington's importance to our understanding of Surrealism. The student, Tor Scott, will build on the analysis of British Surrealism by noted authorities such as Michel Remy and to analyse Rimmington's artistic practice between 1937-1972, with a specific focus on the interwar period. The project will not only explore Rimmington's writing and visual art in the context of her female contemporaries (such as Eileen Agar, Emmy Bridgewater, Marion Adnams and Ithell Colqhoun), but will also refer to art-historical theories such as Zoological Surrealism as proposed by scholars such as J. L. Cahill (particularly with reference to sea imagery denoting escapism during the horrors of war), and feminist approaches to Surrealism by scholars such as Whitney Chadwick, Patricia Allmer and Kate Conley. The thesis will explore themes such as mythology, Goddess Theory, biomorphisim, eroticism and the occult, all of which are deeply embeded within the Surrealist canon.