Madge Gill: The artist whose brush was guided by a ghost
Any decent artist will be all too aware that inspiration can strike at the most unexpected moments. Throughout history, artists have drawn inspiration from countless unexpected avenues, from the childhood hallucinations of Yayoi Kusama to L.S. Lowry’s penchant for factory towers and smog. Even the mysterious supernatural plane has acted as inspiration for the world of painting, but none more so than Madge Gill, the celebrated outsider artist who was helped along by the spirit world.
The realm of outsider art is as broad and varied as the artistic medium itself. Generally, the term can be applied to any artist who was not classically trained in the art world, meaning that a lot of outsider art is made by self-taught visionaries willing to push the boundaries of what can be considered profound art. Madge Gill’s work is particularly beloved within the realm of outsider art, managing to capture a complex range of emotions and themes through various different mediums.
From the outside looking in, Gill appeared to be a fairly ordinary East Ham housewife, spending much of her time caring for her children and supporting her husband. However, the more you delve into the story of the artist, the more tumultuous details surrounding her life reveal themselves. Born an illegitimate child in 1882, Gill was ostracised from her family and sent to an orphanage. From there, she was sent to work as a servant in Ontario, Canada, where she remained for much of her teenage years.
It was upon her return to London in 1900 that she was first introduced to the world of spiritualism by an aunt she was living with at the time. However, this interest was soon overshadowed by the advent of her life as a housewife, having married her cousin and started a family. Gill’s home life, while appearing normal from the outside, was endlessly tragic. Her second son died of Spanish Flu shortly before she herself nearly died while giving birth to a stillborn child.
This incident left Gill resigned to bedrest for months and caused permanent blindness in one eye. It was during this time that she began to take an interest in art and creation, which she had never previously shown enthusiasm for. Reportedly, the artist was guided by the spirit world, creating a plethora of wild, stream-of-consciousness paintings, drawings, and tapestries. There is something distinctly supernatural about her work, which apparently came from her artistic partnership with someone she referred to as ‘Myrninerest’.
Myrninerest was the spirit who was said to have aided Gill in her artistic endeavours. When you look at her work, it is easy to write off the sprawling, obsessive drawings as being an example of ‘mediumistic art’ – art created with the help of the supernatural. In reality, though, the works are likely a result of the deep-rooted trauma that Gill had experienced across her life and the mental health issues that these experiences had instilled upon her.
Regardless of the true inspiration behind Gill’s work, the artist seemed to be at the beckoning call of this Myrninerest figure. So much so that she rarely exhibited her work and never sold any pieces for fear of upsetting or angering the spirit world. Gill stopped creating art altogether following the death of her firstborn son, which led to a serious bout of alcoholism that plagued her until her death in 1968. It was only after her death that her groundbreaking artwork was uncovered, and it remains some of the most celebrated outsider art to this day.
