Our July talk

Recouping otherness – Madge Gill, outsider artist in the East End 

We knew a bit about Madge Gill. Some of us had seen her work on art trail The Line, been to the exhibition at the William Morris Gallery or been interested by her otherness as an outsider artist.

But our July speaker, Rosie Murdoch, has context, and hands-on experience of researching and curating Madge Gill’s prolific body of work.

Rosie ran the View Tube, then the Nunnery Gallery for six years, where her first project was a triptych of exhibitions on Madge Gill. Moving to Newham, Rosie volunteered for its archive, which turned into work for Newham Heritage Service. Rosie also works for UCL East on Trellis, which brings academics and artists together, and has been doing some consultancy for the Royal Docks team.

Madge Gill was born in 1882 in Walthamstow to a single mother, fostered, then in care at Barnardo’s. She was repatriated to Quebec but aged 18, came back to London, where she moved back in with her aunt and mother. She began work as a nurse at Whipps Cross hospital. In 1906 she had her first baby, Laurie, while single and 1907 married Tom Gill, her first cousin. In 1910, she had her second son, Reggie, who died in 1918 of Spanish flu. In 1919, she had a stillborn daughter, then received treatment for cancer of the eye. Treatment in 1922 started a long correspondence with a woman doctor, now deposited at the Society for Psychical Research. In 1926, Laurie published Myrninrest the Spheres, [my inner rest], a paper describing Madge Gill’s mediumistic processes. 

1932 saw Madge Gill exhibiting for the first time at the East End Academy, at the Whitechapel Gallery. A year later, her husband died, she moved to Plashet Grove in East Ham and the family seems to have come into money – she could afford to focus on her art. There were a number of artist groups of workers and others from non-formal backgrounds, the exhibitions ran alongside mainstream shows and they got press attention – though Madge Gill was billed as a “housewife from East Ham”… In 1950 she lost another son and in 1954, wrote that after 35 years she still hadn’t finished the work she started.  She suddenly stopped entering the annual shows and turned down an offer from a West End gallery but did put work into a Soviet aid exhibition at the Wallace Collection.

Madge Gill died in 1961, aged 79. Laurie left her collection to a local archive. 

There are shoeboxes of daily drawn postcards that had been kept under her bed. For the Nunnery exhibitions, artist Jack Hutchinson pledged to draw a postcard a day for 30 days, a challenge that made him understand Madge Gill more. Paul Johnson asked to see personal items and was shown her album – her own selection of her work. Sarah Carne installed her 'I love Yugo' drawing alongside Gill's work. And the project involved looking at massive calico scrolls, so long that Laurie had built a mangle-like mechanism to enable paper to be rolled either side of the work in progress.

The legacy and stories of Madge Gill’s work continue. There is a book by Sophie Dutton. Outreach work has included textile workshops with ELTA and ‘drawing with Madge Gill’ workshops. Her work can be seen on The Line art trail. Slightly less edifying is Madge Gill Way car park…  but there is a blue plaque, ready to go up on 37 Plashet Grove when the time is right.

Just as the talk finished, the projector, moved for packing up, shone Madge Gill's work onto the walls of the meeting hall – our very own, fleeting, exhibition. It's nice when that happens.

A big thank you to Rosie Murdoch for a fascinating talk.

Our July coffee morning, Friday 29 July, 10.30 at Root 25

Join us at Root 25, 116B Bow Road - Bow Church DLR, Bus routes 25, 276, 488, 108, Bow Road Underground. Root 25 is a coffee shop & community space where all profits go to Restless Being's charity projects. It made it to The London Evening Standard's Best coffee/ Bookshop list, so a hint there that a coffee can be combined with some book browsing!

For what’s next at East End WI, look out for our August bulletin.