A pale girl stares inscrutably from a vertiginous, tangled web of dense, obsessively detailed, impossible geometries. She is always discreetly yet stylishly dressed and beautifully coiffed; her face is oval, her bee-stung lips pressed tight together, her large dark eyes sometimes imploring, sometimes coquettish. She is always fully clothed; on rare occasions, a slim hand, a delicate arm reveals itself. The girl appears either alone or surrounded by mirror images; her hectic, labyrinthine world is utterly devoid of men. Sometimes, she too disappears, swallowed entirely by her mesmerising matrix of stars, prisms, fronds and swirling eddies. She was drawn thousands of times, by a half-blind East End widow, and has never been given a name.
Artistic medium
MAUDE ETHEL EAVE - who would later become Madge Gill - was born, illegitimate, in London's Great Portland Street in 1882. Orphaned at the age of nine, she spent a number of years in institutions before being sent to Canada, where she worked as a farmhand.
Returning to London at the turn of the century, she found work as a nurse, lodging with her Aunt Kate, an enthusiastic spiritualist. In 1907, she married her cousin Thomas Gill, a kind-hearted, although feckless, stockbroker's clerk.
The rarely happy couple had three sons (the second, Reggie, died in 1918's flu epidemic) and lived at numerous East End addresses. In 1919, now a practising medium, Gill began her life's work. Seized by a vision of extraordinary clarity, she began to knit, to embroider, then to draw and paint.
"I simply could not leave it and I did on average 20 pictures a week, all in colour. I simply felt inspired," she said.
Burning the midnight lamp
Her minutely-detailed, otherworldly images were conveyed directly by a Spirit Guide ('MYRNINEREST'). Gill laboured night after night, sometimes by oil light, always standing. Postcards, boards, sheets of paper and, later on, huge rolls of calico were feverishly covered in black and coloured inks: one of her largest works, The Crucifixion of the Soul, measures 35'x35'. The postcards and papers were often annotated on the verso with strange neologisms, tortuous French epigrams, and exalted musings on Christ's Mission, the Migration of Souls and the Inhabitants of Mars.
By the mid 1930s, she was showing regularly at the East End Academy. Despite attracting keen interest, she resolutely refused to sell her works, claiming that they remained the property of her Spirit Guide, and rejected proposals of a prestigious West End exhibition.
She died in 1961.
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