Madge Gill: Nature in Mind

Madge Gill: Nature in Mind, curated by The Line with Sophie Dutton, is an exhibition across five sites in Newham that celebrates the inspiration the artist found from natural surroundings.

Madge Gill (1882-1961), who lived and worked in Newham 1920-1961, was a self-taught artist. She created meticulous small-scale and monumental works, skilfully exploring different techniques and formats including paints, inks and textiles. Gill’s life story is one of triumph over adversity. The hardships she endured saw her turn to spiritualism and making, both providing relief from her mental turmoil. Her drawings often feature repetitive patterns of flowers, swirling shapes, architectural forms and checkerboards.

This 60-metre installation over the River Lea is a section of a drawing that shows Gill at her most exploratory and highlights her use of free-flowing leaves, petals, abstract forms and spiderwebs. Her unreserved use of colour imbues the work with life.

Nature in Mind features large-scale installations that reflect the artist’s own process of bringing her largest works outside, into the garden, to see them in their entirety. She often referenced floral elements in her work and once stated: ‘If I were a man, I would have gone abroad and studied botany’.

Read a feature of the project in The Guardian here.

For more information, visit Madge Gill‘s artist page.