Who Was Madge Gill?

On a spring afternoon in 1920, Madge Gill (1882–1961) beckoned her two sons into the garden of their east London home to witness her vision of Christ flanked by angels in the sky. From this moment, Gill was possessed by a spirit guide, Myrninerest, who propelled her into a storm of artistic production that occupied the rest of her life. Gill spoke in unrecognizable languages, played the piano, knitted, crocheted, wrote and drew. Her pages – often signed by Myrninerest – filled with women’s faces, swirling designs and intricate geometry that spoke of the tumult of her life.  

What this visionary perhaps couldn’t foresee was the significance in which her work would one day be held. At Frieze Masters 2025, not one but two national collections acquired pieces by Gill: Untitled (Venus Mid Heaven) (1920/30) was promised as a gift to Tate Britain through the philanthropy of Lance Uggla, and an untitled 1954 work was acquired by the Spirit Now London Acquisition Prize for the National Portrait Gallery.

The works were acquired from the London-based The Gallery of Everything, whose presentation of Gill in the Frieze Masters Spotlight section was the first solo commercial exhibition of her work. Curated in collaboration with art historian Vivienne Roberts, the gallery aimed to communicate the ‘balance, range and a sense of the spectacular’ that defined Gill’s practice, according to gallery director James Brett. Inclusing ‘extremely rare woven pieces which heralded the start of Gill’s artistic journey’, Brett’s presentation spanned works of varying sizes, from postcards to large rolls of calico, a format she favoured. Reincarnation, Gill’s five-metre-long ink drawing on calico, was the first work she showed in public. Included in the 1932 show of local amateur artists at Whitechapel Gallery in the East End, the work attracted national press, even commended by the Times as ‘one of the most remarkable works in the exhibition’.

It was Gill’s London connection that Brett finds most exciting and poignant: she was an artist ‘connected to the heart and soul of London’, born a bus ride’s distance from Frieze Masters. Hailing from the city’s East End, Gill was committed to a Dr Barnardo’s orphanage aged nine, before being sent under a child-labour scheme to work on farms in Ontario until she was 18. She suffered severe physical and mental health difficulties throughout her twenties and thirties, including the removal of one of her eyes, several miscarriages, the death of her eight-year-old son and the stillbirth of her daughter.

When Gill was sent to recover in a women’s health clinic in Hove in 1922, she entrusted a bundle of drawings to her doctor. Deemed ‘more of an inspirational rather than an automatic kind’, they were dismissed by the Society for Psychical Research. But Myrninerest’s spiritual influence persisted, as did Gill’s artmaking. After her 1932 debut, Gill continued to exhibit annually at the Whitechapel Gallery, with her works expanding in size and her refusal to sell them remaining steadfast. Gill’s Upton Park home became a vast reserve of treasures of her own creation. For 40 years, Myrninerest guided Gill’s art-making without respite or conclusion. Near the end of her life, she wrote, ‘Here I am with it still unsolved, and I seem to be losing my hold on life.’ On Gill’s death in 1961, hundreds of drawings and works on calico were discovered in drawers, cupboards and under her bed.

Her son gifted 200 works to Newham Council, while other works entered Jean Dubuffet’s Musée d’Art Brut in Lausanne. Nonetheless, wider institutional recognition was slow, building only over the last 15 years. Works entered the collections of Paris’s Musée national d’art moderne at the Centre Pompidou in 2021, as part of a major donation by collector of art brut Bruno Decharme, and Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery in 2010, through the gift of The Musgrave Kinley Outsider Collection. Gill’s contribution to ‘outsider art’ was recognized in 2024 by her inclusion in ‘Foreigners Everywhere’ at the Venice Biennale, as part of curator Adriano Pedrosa’s mission to showcase voices from the margins of society and the art world. The Crucifixion of the Soul (1934), a vast and vertiginous work, thought to be Gill’s largest, ran the length of the wall in the Central Pavilion. But it was only this year that she was embraced by London’s major museums.

The artist Grayson Perry’s discovery that Gill exhibited at the Wallace Collection in 1942 was inspirational for ‘Delusions of Grandeur’, his exhibition there this year, setting his new works in dialogue with Gill’s. For the exhibition, Perry invented Shirley Smith, a fictional female persona who, following a mental-health crisis, believes she is the heir to the treasured contents of Hertford House. In an Instagram post, Perry called Gill ‘a great artist to look at right now’, who teaches us ‘the power of art to deal with the painful events life throws your way’. Just days before the exhibition closed, the acquisitions from Frieze Masters were announced. 

‘That an important work by Madge Gill has been announced as a promised gift to Tate is both a welcome and transformative addition to the collection,’ said Gregor Muir, director of collection at Tate. The acquired rare work on calico is already earmarked for display at Tate Britain, Muir confirmed, ‘where it will help tell a more inclusive story of 20th-century British art, with particular reference to spiritualism and mediumistic art’. Spiritualism and the occult are increasingly important topics for contemporary art, guiding the theme of the 2025 Seoul Mediacity Biennale, ‘Séance: Technology of the Spirit’, as well as major exhibitions of Hilma af Klint in London, New York and Bilbao.

‘As a practitioner of spiritualism, Gill opens up new ways of representing identity and the possibilities of portraiture,’ said Flavia Frigeri, curatorial and collections director at the National Portrait Gallery, of their acquisition, a drawing that portrays a single female figure jostled by tessellating colours and shapes. ‘Gill’s portrait will add significantly to our rich interwar tapestry of lives and portraits.’

Gill being finally embraced by institutions – and major public figures such as Perry – in the same city where she was born and worked, has a special significance, and suggests attention to her remarkable legacy will only grow. ‘While it may be the first work by this visionary artist to become available to us,’ Muir said, ‘I’m certain it will not be the last.’

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^{Main image: Madge Gill hanging one of her artworks in the garden of her home in Plashet Grove, East Ham, London, 19 August 1947, assisted by her son, Lawrence. Photograph: Russell Westwood/Popperfoto via Getty Images. Courtesy: The Gallery of Everything}