Myrninerest

Madge Gill made several thousand drawings and did not sign any of them with her own name.

They are signed Myrninerest, who was, as she explained it, a spirit — the one who arrived on 3 March 1920 when she was thirty-eight, and who stayed for the next forty-one years. The name is generally read as My Inner Rest.

Before

She was born Maude Eades in Walthamstow in 1882, illegitimate at a moment when that was a serious social fact. Her family kept her out of sight, and at nine she was put into a Barnardo’s home although her mother was alive. As a teenager she was shipped to Canada under the child migration schemes, and she came back to England as soon as she was old enough, at eighteen or nineteen.

She married her cousin, had children, and in the years around 1918 lost a son and the sight of one eye. In 1921, she gave birth to a stillborn daughter, and afterwards spent time under treatment in Hove, where somebody had the sense to tell her to keep drawing.

The work

She drew at night, by candlelight, extremely fast, on whatever was to hand.

Postcards, mostly — fifty to a hundred in one sitting, each one covered edge to edge in ink. Card. Cotton. And rolls of calico, unrolled across the floor of a house in East Ham and worked along their length, some of them thirty feet long. There is a photograph from August 1947 of her in the back garden at Plashet Grove hanging up a piece eleven metres by nearly two, because that was the only way to see the whole thing at once.

The surfaces are dense to the point of airlessness — repeating chequers, spirals, latticework, architectural forms that will not resolve. And through them, over and over, a young woman’s face: pointed chin, dark eyes, sometimes with a robe and a body, sometimes floating on its own.

She has never been identified. The candidates are the stillborn daughter, Myrninerest, and Gill herself, and there is no reason it cannot be all three.

She was self-taught and had no interest in being anything else. She said once that if she had been a man she would have gone abroad and studied botany.

Refusing to sell

She exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery several times, and became locally known as a medium and an eccentric.

But she would not sell. Her position was straightforward and unshakeable: the work was not hers. Myrninerest had made it, and it was not hers to trade. Where she was pressed, she priced pieces so far beyond reach that nobody could take them.

So the drawings stayed in the house, and by the time she died in 1961 they were in every cupboard and under the bed.

Her son gave nearly two thousand of them to Newham Council, where they still are. At least as many again went out through house clearance and private sale and are now scattered across the world, in Lausanne and Lille and in collections that would not have existed in her lifetime. Some of the largest works are thought to have been thrown away.