British mediumistic draughtswoman, born Maude Ethel Eades on 19 January 1882 in east London, died in 1961.
Life
Regarded as an illegitimate child, she was kept out of sight in her early years. At nine, although her mother was still alive, she was placed in one of Dr Barnardo’s homes at Barkingside. In 1896 she was among the children sent to Canada, where she was put to work as a domestic servant on farms in Ontario. Back in East Ham in 1900, she lived with an aunt who introduced her to spiritualism and astrology, and worked as a nurse at Whipps Cross Hospital.
At twenty-five she married her cousin Thomas Edwin Gill, a stockbroker. The couple had three sons. The second, Reginald, died of Spanish flu; the following year she gave birth to a stillborn daughter. The illness that followed confined her to bed for several months and left her blind in her left eye. It was then, around 1920, at thirty-eight, that she suddenly began to draw. After the death of her eldest son in 1958 she sank into alcoholism and stopped drawing. Thousands of drawings were discovered in her home at her death.
The work
Madge Gill attributed her work to a spirit guide she called Myrninerest (“my inner rest”), the name with which she often signed her works. For fear of displeasing it, she never sold anything. She drew mainly in black ink, on supports ranging from postcards to long rolls of calico, some more than nine metres long; she also knitted, wove and wrote. Prolific, she could complete dozens of drawings in a single night.
Her compositions repeat oval female faces with large almond eyes, often staring, caught in chequerboards and labyrinthine architectures, the bodies almost absent or hidden beneath heavy clothing. The art historian Roger Cardinal speaks in her regard of “an art of concealment”.
Exhibitions and collections
- Whitechapel Gallery, London: exhibitions from 1932 to 1947, including that of 1939 in which she showed a work of some 40 metres covering a whole wall
- 2006: “Outsider Art”, Tate Britain; 2019: “Myrninerest”, William Morris Gallery, London; 2024: Venice Biennale
- Collections: London Borough of Newham (main holding); Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne; LaM, Villeneuve-d’Ascq (L’Aracine donation, 1999); Centre Pompidou (Bruno Decharme donation, 2021)
- At the gallery: Sans titre, 1953, 63 x 51 cm, shown in the exhibition “Art Brut” (June-July 2022)