11.6.2026

10 AM – 10:30 AM

INTRODUCTION

Amanda Carneiro, Curator, MASP

10:30 AM – 12 PM

Round table

VIVIENNE ROBERTS

Making Sense of Madge Gill: Seeing, Hearing and Feeling the Invisible

Discussion of Madge Gill has long been constrained by biography and classification within outsider art. This presentation repositions her in the field of mediumistic and visionary art, connecting her work to the cultural concerns of her time, including modernism, music, materiality, and scientific innovation. It also engages gender studies, addressing tensions faced by women working with alternative spiritualities, including debates around mental health and archaic laws governing their practice. In this context, Gill emerges as a figure negotiating authorship and agency, whose work disrupts established hierarchies and resonates with contemporary interests.

Central to this reevaluation is a multisensory approach that positions hearing and feeling alongside vision. Working within a culture fascinated by the invisible, Gill renders the immaterial tangible through embodied processes in which her body and materials act as conduits for unseen forces, expanding perception. Her automatic drawings and textiles demonstrate how repetitive mark making and stitching produce sensory encounters beyond vision, while her rhythmic forms invite a sonorous reading. Ultimately, Gill is established as an integral figure within a lineage of spiritually engaged women reshaping how art is sensed and understood.

JONATHAN GREEN

Madge Gill’s States of Mind

Madge Gill has been recognized and valued since early in her artistic production, which reportedly began after a divine vision in March 1920. I come to her work from the perspective of a clinician, a student of mental health development, and of psychology and art. From a study of documentary evidence and the work itself, I am interested to try and understand her state of mind, both as she began and then continued her prodigious output. What was the background and nature of her artistic drive and her declared “mediumship”? How can we understand this for her own life, and how does this connect more generally within art practice and a tradition of “visionary” artwork?

Mediated by: Valentin Diakonov, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Whitworth

12 PM – 1 PM

Break

1 PM – 2:30 PM

Round table

SOPHIE DUTTON

Reading Between the Lines: The Layered History of Madge Gill

Madge Gill’s difficult life experiences have often become inseparable from the way audiences are invited to interpret her drawings and embroideries; this framing of the artist can at times overshadow the extraordinary power of the work itself. However, through understanding the life events that shaped the artist, we can begin to appreciate the forces that inspired her prolific creative impulses. Seeking to connect the dots, through years of research, conversations with collectors, and with people who encountered Gill and her work firsthand, I have sought to understand the artist herself, her work, and what drove her artistic outpouring. Was it her natural creative instinct, a means of processing trauma, or an impulse she spiritually channeled? When we look at Madge Gill’s work today, are we responding to the legend of the artist, or to the undeniable impact of the work itself?

ANN COXON

On Lines and Stitches: Madge Gill’s Textiles

This paper will ask how we might understand and contextualize Madge Gill’s enigmatic embroidered textiles through consideration of their purpose, process, materiality, and affect. Photographs from 1947 show Gill at home wearing one of her heavily embroidered dresses; on a couch surrounded by her hand-stitched ‘rugs’; and in the garden with her extraordinary drawing on lengths of calico hanging on a makeshift washing-line. These pictures will be discussed alongside images of the textile pieces that came to light in 2018. Gill’s textiles do not fit into neat categories. Colored threads have been worked into backing cloths with millions of stitches, obscuring their surfaces and spilling beyond the edges. Unlike traditional embroidered textiles, they appear to be neither useful nor beautiful. Gill’s textiles are heavily worked, repetitive, and unique. Was she using needle and thread as a form of psychological repair work? Was she channeling her spirit-guide? Or did stitching serve another purpose for Madge Gill?

Mediated by: David Queiroz, Research Assistant, MASP.

ANN COXON

Ann Coxon is an internationally renowned curator, writer, and researcher with a specialist interest in textile practices within modern and contemporary art. For over 20 years, she was a curator at Tate Modern, where she co-curated the landmark exhibitions Magdalena Abakanowicz: Every Tangle of Thread and Rope (2022); Dorothea Tanning (2019); and Anni Albers (2018). Ann is currently teaching History of Art and Curating at the Courtauld Institute and has recently completed a Ph.D. thesis on New Tapestry in Europe 1962-1970, funded by the AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership scheme with Tate and University College London (UCL). She has published many catalogue essays and articles, as well as two books: Motherhood, Tate Publishing (2023); and Louise Bourgeois, Tate Publishing (2010).

JONATHAN GREEN

Jonathan Green, FRCPsych, FMedSci, is Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Manchester, UK, and Consultant at the Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital. He trained in Pediatrics and then Adult and Child Psychiatry in London and Oxford, before moving to Manchester. His work has focused on early child attachment, social development, and autistic development. He is a Fellow of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences. Jonathan has also been a painter since his early teenage years, studying painting in Paris and Winchester as a time out from medicine. He has continued painting and exhibited increasingly in the last 20 years. He is the author of Form and Mental State: An Interpersonal Approach to Painting and other writings on art.

SOPHIE DUTTON

Sophie Dutton is a curator, researcher, and designer. She founded Works by Madge Gill in 2016 to share Gill's artwork and history with the communities Gill was originally connected to. She has curated exhibitions of Gill’s work, including Myrninerest at The William Morris Gallery (2019); Madge Gill: Nature in Mind, along The Line art trail (2021); and The Clouds Will Burst the Sun Will Shine Again at the Midlands Art Centre (2023). In 2025, she consulted on content related to Gill and developed the public engagement program accompanying Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur at the Wallace Collection. She edited and designed Madge Gill by Myrninerest, a monograph first published by Rough Trade Books in 2019, with a second edition released in 2025.

VIVIENNE ROBERTS

Vivienne Roberts is an art historian and curator specializing in mediumistic and visionary art. A former curator at the College of Psychic Studies, she has organized exhibitions exploring intersections between spiritualism and art, including Strange Things Among Us (2021) and Creative Spirits (2022). Her touring exhibition Tranceducers: Art of Visionaries, Mediums and Automatists was presented in London and St Ives from 2025 to 2026. Current projects include a new series of collaborative exhibitions, beginning in June 2026 with a solo show on Louise Janin. She has founded several research websites, including madgegill.com, and is a member of the British Art Network and the Visionary Women Research Group.