151024753Madge Gill18821961Madge Gill’s drawings are labyrinthine, with dense checkered patterns, staircases, spirals, and gazing oval-shaped faces emerging from tangles of line and cross-hatching in ink. Some of her thousands of works are as small as a postcard; others fill large pieces of plain calico fabric that unfurl to thirty feet in length. She also created equally detailed embroidery. The improvisational quality of her art reflects how she claimed to work, with a spirit she called “Myrninerest” (sometimes interpreted as “my inner rest”) guiding her hand. Attributing work to an unseen presence was not uncommon for artists who, like Gill, were involved in Spiritualism. This movement started in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century and led to the international rise of mediums and seances to make spirit contact. Born Maude Eades in 1882 in London, Gill was a source of shame for her family as an illegitimate child, and she was sent to an orphanage and then to labor on farms in Canada. She returned to London in the early 1900s and lived with an aunt, through whom she encountered Spiritualism. Yet she didn’t experience artistic mediumship until around 1920. She had married Tom Gill, her cousin; by many accounts it was a hard marriage, a difficulty deepened by the losses of a son to the 1918 flu pandemic and of a daughter who was stillborn. Gill had her own decline in health following this pregnancy, losing an eye. Some have speculated that the female figure that reappears across numerous drawings is a self-portrait or a manifestation of grief for her lost daughter. Gill received some mainstream attention during her lifetime, including exhibitions starting in the 1930s, but she expressed little interest in the limelight. Instead, she continued to create constantly, with Myrninerest as her guide, often finishing several drawings in a single night as she worked by candlelight. After she died, in 1961, her son gave over 1,200 of the drawings found stacked under her bed and filling her cupboards to the London Borough of Newham. It continues to hold this prolific collection of art, in which Gill considered herself merely a transmitter of visions from a world beyond our own. Allison C. Meier, 2025 Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).MadgeGillhttps://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/25629/full(1882–1961)East HamWalthamstowEast HamWalthamstowEast HamWalthamstowMadge GillMaude Ethel Eades