Madge Gill: Myrninerest, Music and Mars
Essay by Vivienne Roberts 2023 (all rights reserved)
Madge Gill was nearly forty years old when she first experienced a compulsive urge to create art under the guidance of spirits. It became an activity that consumed her for the rest of her life and resulted in an outpouring that ranged from large scale drawings on calico to thousands of ink drawings on the humble postcard, as well as an array of vibrant textile works. The works consisted of myriad female faces with mesmerising eyes surrounded by rhythmic configurations of geometrical and botanical forms. These recurring motifs, which on closer inspection revealed symbols and words, often with astrological and biblical references, hinted at layers of complexity within the work.
Madge was a proponent of mediumistic art, a phenomenon that began in the 1850s and can be defined as art created by a person, referred to as a medium, under the influence of, or in collaboration with, discarnate entities and executed whilst in some form of altered state of consciousness, ranging from passive contemplation to full somnambulistic trance. It is a phenomenon that emerged with the onset of Modern Spiritualism, a popular movement that swept through America and large parts of Europe during the mid 19th Century, proclaiming that communication between the material realm and the spirit world was possible.
Initially, Spiritualism was attractive as a phenomenon that gave comfort to the bereaved by offering them a chance to communicate with their deceased loved ones. However, it soon attracted a wider following as it evolved into a movement with a reputation for championing equality and challenging patriarchal structures, religious dogma and scientific empiricism. With opportunities ordinarily denied to them in society at that time, women found a voice and flourished in the movement which soon became synonymous with women’s rights.
As a product of the spiritualist phenomenon, mediumistic art can be seen as an interface between the physical and metaphysical realms. It is art imbued with invisible energies and the ability to provoke thought, inspire, bring hope, heal and uplift its viewers. Originating from the spirit world, it was free from the usual constraints and inherently non-conformist. The more it pushed the boundaries of traditional art the more otherworldly it was perceived. Strange esoteric symbols, ancient languages, primordial creatures, fairies, elementals and nature spirits, extraterrestrial figures, planetary landscapes, abstract auras, ectoplasmic presences, as well as a cornucopia of gloriously numinous flora all formed the visual language of mediumistic art.
Spiritualism’s golden age was in the late 19th century when fledgling societies such as the London Spiritualist Alliance (now The College of Psychic Studies), the Society of Psychical Research and the Theosophical Society were beginning to flourish. They attracted prominent members from around the world who were from scientific, esoteric and artistic backgrounds which allowed for a richly diverse dissemination of knowledge. It was an exciting time where these disparate fields of studies were converging with the aim of pushing the boundaries of knowledge in the physical world and exploring the metaphysical in an attempt to satisfy their fascination with the invisible.
It was during this maelstrom of discovery that Madge Gill entered the world as Maud Eades. She was born illegitimately in 1882 in Walthamstow, East London. The identity of her father was a shameful secret and her mother Emma was deemed too feeble to be a good mother. She abandoned her only child and returned to the family home in London’s affluent West End where her father William Baxter Eades was the caretaker of the Central Synagogue. He lived there with his wife, four adult daughters and four sons who were gainfully employed in the banking, dental and shipping industries.
A family photograph shows that Madge did have some contact with her birth family over the nine years she spent in foster care, but in 1891, when William retired and could no longer afford to pay for her keep, she was placed in a Dr Barnardo’s orphanage. In 1896, at age 14 she was sent to Canada as part of a Barnardos project to help unprivileged children. It was not a pleasant experience and at the first opportunity, in 1901, Madge returned to England where she reconnected with her foster family, earning her keep as a blouse machinist and then finding employment as a nurse at her local hospital.
She also rekindled her relationship with her birth family and in particular her aunt, Kate Gill. Kate had two sons, Bert and Tom, who were both clerks in the financial sector. Madge formed a close relationship with the youngest son, Tom, and became pregnant with Laurie, who was born out of wedlock shortly before the couple married on New Year’s Day in 1907. A second son, Reggie, was born in 1910 followed by Leonard, known as Bob, in 1913. All three births had complications, leaving Madge weak and bedridden for several weeks. She also suffered several miscarriages.
The advent of the first world war brought even more hardship, but when Tom returned unscathed they must have thought their lives would return to normal. Sadly, tragedy struck when her son Reggie, aged 8, perished on October 27th 1918 during the flu pandemic. It was a tremendous loss for Madge, from which she never recovered. This dire situation was made worse when just over a year later her left eye had to be removed after a cancer diagnosis. Concern for her welfare grew considerably when on March 3rd 1920 she suddenly began to sing Home Sweet Home at the top of her voice and, feeling inspired, led her two boys into the garden where she saw a vision of Christ on a cross with angels in the sky.
Illness and traumatic experiences such as war and bereavement are all common gateways for developing a heightened sensitivity to spiritual awareness and Madge experienced all of these hardships in a short timeframe. This culminated in her life-changing visionary experience on that day in Spring, after which she felt she was guided by an unseen force. At first Madge identified this force as a High Priest from Babylon, and subsequently as a feminine entity called Myrninerest. It is suggested that Myrninerest stands for ‘my inner rest’ or ‘my innerest’ indicating that it is a source of comfort for Madge or possibly a creative force that originates from another realm of consciousness deep within her. An alternative interpretation can be found in her drawings. One is inscribed ‘My-rn-iner-est’ with ‘Children of the East’ written on the reverse and another contains the words ‘mine people of the east – Myrninerest’ hinting that, like the High Priest, Myrninerest is connected to ancient eastern times, with a prominent association with children. After the traumatic experiences Madge endured this would certainly make sense.
Madge felt honoured to have been bestowed with this special gift of spirit communication. It gave her purpose and she wholeheartedly embraced her strange new life. An unstoppable flow of creativity ensued that led to her writing streams of biblical script, speaking in unknown languages, playing the piano, knitting, stitching, weaving and drawing brilliant creations for hours on end. Of utmost importance to Madge was her belief that when her enigmatic artworks were deciphered they would reveal the secrets of the Garden of Eden and offer a key to the world’s progress.
It might have been a revelation for Madge at the time, but this was the dawn of the age of wireless communication and the idea of hearing spirit voices was not beyond the realm of comprehension when compared to hearing disembodied voices through the radio. Physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, an ardent advocate of Spiritualism, and Guglielmo Marconi, who on the odd occasion had also attended seances, were pioneers in this field and in June 1920, as Madge’s embarked on her spiritual journey, Marconi made history when he gave his first live entertainment broadcast from his wireless factory in Chelmsford. For this momentous occasion the famous singer Dame Nellie Melba was asked to sing and she chose the song Home Sweet Home, just as Madge did on the day of her life-changing epiphany three months earlier.
However, whilst Marconi’s success over the airwaves was a cause of excitement and celebration, Madge’s proclaimed ability to receive messages from the spirit world was a concern for her husband, who thought his wife’s behaviour necessitated medical intervention. The situation became even more serious early in 1921 when Madge nearly died after giving birth to a stillborn girl. It was a life-shattering blow that left Madge unable to cope. Vehemently refusing treatment in an asylum, Madge was fortunate to secure a place under the superb care of Dr Helen Boyle, who accepted Madge as an inpatient in January 1922 at her Lady Chichester Hospital for Women and Children in the seaside resort of Hove, a pioneering establishment formed in 1905 to specialise in the early treatment of nervous disorders.
Madge responded well to the combination of rest, physical exercise, creative activities and invigorating sea air. During this time she did not curtail her spiritual activities. She continued to draw and write automatically, she switched to speaking in strange languages whenever it was requested, and happily gave character readings to the other patients. She wrote letters to Boyle containing streams of consciousness and observations of visions, etheric waves and auras that she could see everywhere around her. Surprisingly, Boyle was sympathetic and instead of treating Madge’s outpourings as manifestations of madness she went to great lengths to help Madge make sense of them. Boyle arranged for the recording, now lost, of Madge’s glossolalia, and contacted the Society of Psychical Research to seek guidance, sending several artworks to them for analysis. Unfortunately, the artworks attracted little interest from the Society and were returned a few weeks later.
Madge was fully recuperated by April 1922, and was discharged from hospital. Her interest in spiritualistic phenomena had not diminished, proving to some extent that it may not have been just a symptom of her nervous breakdown. On returning to London, Madge and her family moved in with Aunt Kate, who was also a spiritualist, and her cousin Bert, a keen astrologer who in 1918 had helped to establish the short lived British College of Astrology and also lectured on the subject at The London Astrological Society. It is very likely that Bert, an ardent participant in esoteric studies, would have been a significant influence on Madge who later, in 1938, tried her hand at earning money from casting horoscopes under the mystical sounding pseudonym Kharmastra. It certainly was not an ordinary household in the working class area of East London with Laurie entertaining the family with his inspired piano playing whilst Bert immersed himself in his library of astrology books and Madge in her artmaking. They joined the Theosophical Society and on occasion attended the local spiritualist churches, where Madge sometimes showed her work. These public spaces became hives of activity after the war, attracting large numbers of the bereaved who were seeking solace. There was also an unprecedented rise in the number of home circles where mediums, including Madge, held seances in the privacy of the domestic setting for family and friends.
Madge’s mediumistic activity and claims that her artworks held answers to some of life’s mysteries soon came to the attention of the press. The Sunday Express printed a short interview with her in November 1922 followed a week or so later in the spiritualist newspaper, Light. Attracting such attention must have been a daunting prospect for an introvert like Madge, but intent on finding experts to help her unlock the secrets in the work, she overcame her natural shyness. It may have been through the media that Madge came to the attention of the spiritualists and had some of her drawings selected for an exhibition of spirit art in the salon at the International Spiritualist Congress in Belgium in 1923. Occurring soon after the end of the war, the Congress was a grand celebratory affair and leading the UK delegation was Britain’s most famous spiritualist and inventor of the legendary Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Years later, in 1963, Madge’s son mentions in a letter that Doyle had been very interested in her work which he probably became aware of at this event. It is evident that Madge did think about Conan Doyle as his name is written on at least one of her artworks.
Coming from a family of painters, Conan Doyle understood the potency of a picture to garner attention and believed it was a perfect form of propaganda to attract a wider audience who would find its visual language accessible and engaging. In 1925, he set up a psychic bookshop and small museum near Westminster Abbey with all available wall space devoted to spirit art and photography. The same year he gave a speech at the opening of the blockbuster Exhibition of Objects of Psychic Interest arranged by the London Spiritualist Alliance of which he became President until his death in 1930. The advent of art taking a prominent role at spiritual public events was not limited to the spiritualists. Theosophical, Anthroposophical and Psychical Research gatherings, as well as exhibitions in commercial galleries also featured mediumistic art in their programmes. With Madge’s quest to learn more about the art she was making and her close proximity to London it is entirely possible throughout the 1920s she may have seen first hand art by Hilma af Klint, Ethel le Rossignol, Heinrich Nüsslein, Anna Howitt Watts, Arild Rosenkrantz, Georgiana Houghton, Josef Kocián, Victorien Sardou and Alice Pery to name a few. If this was the case it would have been difficult for her not to notice that their art shared a remarkable resemblance to her own.
By this time Madge’s art had begun to show a fascination with astrology. Largely due to the work of Alan Leo, known as the grandfather of modern astrology, it was a topic that had been filtering into the public consciousness for quite some time since his affordable and accessible series of manuals led to the democratisation of the practice. It became part and parcel of popular culture, helped considerably by the resounding success of British composer and theosophist Gustav Holst’s 1922 recording by the London Symphony Orchestra of his innovative and hugely popular seven-movement suite called The Planets (1914-17). During this performance the listener is taken on an astrological journey through sound, leading them to intuitively understand the mood and characteristics of each planet. Composed at the outbreak of war, The Planet’s first movement, Mars – The Bringer of War, would have resonated greatly with the public and acted as a poignant reminder of the time in which they lived.
The idea of life on Mars had ignited the imagination of the masses ever since Schiaparelli saw what appeared to be channels on the planet in 1877. The idea began to disseminate quickly into fiction including the spiritualist book Mars Revealed, published anonymously in 1880. When the eminent French astronomer and psychical researcher, Camille Flammarion, wrote about journeys to other planets in his books Urania in 1889, and Lumen in 1897, he was credited with anticipating the beginnings of science fiction as a literary genre, which was made famous by the English author H. G. Wells with his 1898 sensational The War of the Worlds, a book about a Martian invasion. Flammarion became President of the Society of Psychical Research in 1922 and was evidently admired by Madge who inscribed on one of her large calico drawings the words ‘Flammarion mon cher ami’. Not to miss out on this planetary zeitgeist, Marconi became involved too when he suggested that his wireless technology would be capable of communicating with the planet.
Unsurprisingly, the allure of communicating with other planets had been a subject for mediumistic artists since the beginning of the movement. The pioneering French drawing medium Victorien Sardou had been depicting his visions of Jupiter since the late 1850s and in 1864 the French spiritualist periodical La Vérité featured drawings by Mlle Viret of flowers from Saturn. Probably the best known was Hélène Smith (Catherine-Elise Müller) who was the subject of the book Des Indes à la planète Mars written by psychologist and psychical researcher Théodore Flournoy and featured a selection of her automatic paintings and writing specimens depicting life on the planet and the language she said was used there. Smith later became of great interest to André Breton and the Surrealists who adopted her as their muse due to her impressive ability to write and draw whilst in an altered state of consciousness.
Mars became a firm favourite with the mediums in 20th Century too when the German medium Heinrich Nüsslein used his fingers to paint Martian landscapes which he completed in a matter of minutes and Madge, in her inimitable style, created a supramundane view of the planet, consisting of abstract forms with embedded symbols and glyphs.
Whether it was from the influence of her cousin Bert, Flammarion, Leo, or a tapping into the collective consciousness of that time, Madge’s art in the 1920s and 1930s positively brimmed with astrological references, as evidenced by titles such as Myrninerest Mars, Astralasia and Cosmic Cavalcade. With incredible stamina she worked for hours each day creating works so vast that it was impossible to see them in their entirety in her small house. In 1932 this opportunity arose when the Whitechapel Gallery opened its East End Academy annual exhibition. Encouraged by her family, Madge became a regular participant until 1947. It was the first time the public and mainstream artworld discovered what an incredible artist she was.
Her submission in 1938, in the form of three calico drawings, was a staggering 108 feet long. It is astonishing to think that Picasso’s new masterpiece Guernica, at 25 feet long, must have looked small in comparison when it was hung in the same position two weeks later. Incredibly, her submission the following year was even longer, stretching to 120 feet and on a subsequent occasion Laurie felt the need to apologise on behalf of Madge when she only managed to complete works totalling a meagre 80 feet. Large scale works such as these were unusual at the time, and even more so for female artists. Madge was not shy of going big and bold with a confidence that surprised all around her.
Madge’s shimmering kaleidoscopic tapestries and epic calico drawings dominated the gallery wall space and were often the star attraction, garnering many favourable press reviews. In May 1937 the popular occult magazine, Prediction, described her as the ‘most noteworthy practitioner in London’ and published their interview with her which posited a serious explanation of the meaning behind such extraordinary works: ‘Yet another theory is based on the fact that every event, thought and action in the world’s history evolves into a vibrational state. Is it possible that the present artist has been inspired to a special degree of sensitiveness, which enables her to receive those vibrations, and then translate them into various forms of expression?’ It was an insightful question and one that if answered could lead to a new way of looking at her art, observed through the lens of spiritualistic discourse on the forms the invisible world may take.
The idea that the rich proliferation of geometric and organic abstract forms encompassing the figurative elements in her art were not mere decorative mark-making but actually the expressions of sonorous waves, electric currents, auric flows, magnetic forces or otherworldly energies must have resonated greatly with Madge, who referred several times in letters contained in her medical file that she could see waves all around her as well as auras. If validated it would demonstrate that, like others who worked in a similar way, she was pushing the boundaries of the genre and making a significant contribution to its development.
Theories of what visible form the immaterial could take had been a regular feature in the spiritual periodicals at the end of the 19th century. In 1887 Benjamin Betts, an architect and philosopher, explained his theories on the evolution of human consciousness in a book called Geometric Psychology or The Science of Representation. The book demonstrated the stages of this evolutionary theory by means of geometric diagrams that unexpectedly took on the appearance of flowers, something which was of interest to mediumistic artists because they felt it validated the ubiquitous floral forms found in their art, thereby proving they were not merely mundane depictions of flowers, but supramundane depictions of intuitively driven consciousness.
In his book Betts acknowledged the existence of an alternative perception not available to our normal senses, but by more subtle interior senses such as those demonstrated in spiritualistic phenomena such as clairvoyance and clairaudience, which he referred to as astral senses. He also said that the magnetic aura of each individual is perceived clairvoyantly in varying colours and that ‘Forces of any kind, not only the activities of human consciousness may similarly be represented by diagram’, stating that mathematics were ‘the handmaid of metaphysical as well as physical science.’
The Welsh singer Margaret Watts Hughes held the accolade of being the first woman in its then 200 year history to demonstrate her invention to London’s Royal Society. Hughes believed she had revealed a hidden world using the vibrating sound waves of her voice through a home-made instrument called an Eidophone, resulting in a series of sound-forms which she called Voice-Figures. This rustic device consisted of a membrane covered in pigment and created visible forms that were then fixed onto glass plates for inspection. This transmutation of sound into form caused a sensation when exhibited at the popular New Gallery on Regent Street in October 1889, and received much attention from the newspapers who described the harmonious colours of floral, shell-like and often geometric forms, as having an ‘uncanny beauty’. This was picked up by the spiritual and theosophical press too, who said it was ‘as if the harmonies of the singer’s noble voice had, like a spell, evoked from a fairy-world, the beauteous models from which natural evolution draws its supply of visualised shapes.’ and noted that the voice figures were curiously similar to ‘certain well-known peculiarities of spirit drawings.’
The visualisation of the invisible, either as abstract or resembling representational forms, was important for the mediumistic artists who recognised the similarities with their own work, and for prominent theosophists Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater, who were also working on their own theories about the invisible which included ideas on the visual appearance of thoughts, sounds, auras, and even the atom. Their forms were observed clairvoyantly and artists were employed for illustration purposes, resulting in several visually rich and influential publications including Man Visible and Invisible (1903), Thought-Forms (1905), and Occult Chemistry (1908).
In her 1895 address, The Future that Awaits Us, Besant saw how the latest developments in esoteric and scientific explorations into the invisible could influence a new generation of artists where ‘so many more colours will then delight the eye, brilliant and vivid of hue, translucent, exquisite, and soft; such varieties of changing forms in the astral world, so much more to delineate, to reproduce – for even down in the physical world the canvas of the painter will glow with the beauties of the astral.’ How right she was. The spiritual became a major influence on the birth of modern abstraction, demonstrated by the art of Hilma af Klint, Wassily Kandinsky, František Kupka and Piet Mondrian. It was equally important for the mediumistic artists like Madge whose work also reflected these latest developments.
Although the mediumistic artists and the abstract pioneers were like minded in their fascination with the metaphysical world, the two groups did not have a significant influence on each other. They worked separately but in parallel, demonstrating similarities in their artworks and sharing the sources that influenced them. The primary difference was that the mediums worked intuitively, staunchly believing that their art derived from an authentic communication with the spirit world and contained a message or higher knowledge that could be imparted to a third party. The abstractionists engaged with the spiritual on a more theoretical basis, stemming from disillusionment with the confines of the material world.
When looking at Madge’s drawings it is probably the forms pertaining to sound that are most worthy of consideration. The word ‘music’ appears many times in her work, leading the viewer to notice the rhythmic forms and mesmerising harmony in her art. We know she felt compelled to sing and would listen to her son playing the piano for hours while she sat drawing in semi-darkness. Is it possible that Madge was tuning into the vibration of sounds around her and, akin to a synaesthetic experience, she clairvoyantly saw the forms they made?
Synaesthesia is a particularly fascinating phenomenon which gives rise to a kind of merging of the senses in approximately eighty combinations, such as seeing sounds as shapes or colours. They can appear with the eyes open or shut and are believed to be a property of visual perception. Perhaps Madge’s loss of an eye to cancer in combination with her heightened state of trauma manifested in a heightened awareness of the senses, leading to her depiction of geometric forms and kaleidoscopic colours found in her textiles and drawings.
In 1926, German American psychologist Heinrich Klüver undertook a series of groundbreaking experiments with the hallucinogenic drug mescaline. He discovered that as well as highly saturated colours and vivid imagery there were recurring geometric patterns he called ‘form constants’. These included triangles, cobwebs, tunnels, funnels, cones, vessels, spirals and lattices of chequerboards, honeycomb, fretwork, and filigree. Klüver noticed that these form constants were frequently repeated, combined or elaborated into ornamental designs. It is compelling that all of these forms can be found in abundance in Madge’s art. Furthermore, it is interesting that Klüver thought these forms were not only derived from hallucinations but also from other altered states of consciousness including near death experiences, hypnagogia, migraine, scrying or divination. The latter describes a state in which intuition is used to derive meaning from forms. The sensory experiences of those with synaesthesia are another example and it is possible that Madge experienced these form constants and felt compelled to make them visible in her work.
Madge didn’t receive the attention that her art deserved during her lifetime. She survived the war and last exhibited in 1947, after which she slipped away from public view and continued her artmaking in relative obscurity. When her cousin Bert died in 1948 and her son Bob two years later, Madge felt a light go out and, beseeched by ill health, she completed her last drawing in 1958. She had never felt comfortable selling her work, believing it was a gift from the other side and not hers to sell, and when she died on 28th January 1961 at the age of 79, forty years of her creative output was found bundled in the loft and any other available nook and cranny.
In 1963, her only surviving child Laurie donated hundreds of his mother’s artworks to what is now the Newham Council. The remaining artworks filtered through to the commercial galleries and, after a show in 1968 at The Grosvenor Gallery called The Guided Hand, they came to the attention of Jean Dubuffet who acquired over one hundred examples for his renowned Collection de l’Art Brut. Put simply, art brut describes art that is created impulsively from an untutored artist’s heart without regard for conventional artistic cultures. According to Dubuffet, Madge’s mediumistic claims of creating art under the guidance of spirits were similar to several other artists in his collection, and in his opinion this was a product of their humble background. Dubuffet’s assumption was that this circumstance led the artist to believe they were not entitled to award themselves the title of artist and instead invented a convenient proxy in the form of a spirit guide to circumvent them being acknowledged as the original creator.
Madge became recognised as a doyenne of art brut and undoubtedly benefited from its association, which led to her work being safeguarded and appreciated. The same can be said for fellow mediumistic artists such as Laure Pigeon, Henriette Zéphir, Raphaël Lonné, Augustin Lesage, Joseph Crépin and Jeanne Tripier who were also selected for the collection. The association may have been detrimental too. As spiritualists and theosophists, the artists would have wholeheartedly believed that their art held a serious spiritual purpose, with the ability to reveal the connections between the macrocosm and microcosm, the planetary and cosmic influences on earth, knowledge of our primordial roots, and what the future might look like. The fact that the spiritual authenticity of their work was brought into question would have been a galling prospect, preventing them from being taken seriously as exponents of mediumistic art, in stark contrast to their trained counterparts like Hilma af Klint.
More recently, mediumistic art is seen as a category in its own right, the reasons of which are twofold. Throughout its history the majority of its practitioners have been women, and the art world is keen to address the inequality that women artists have suffered at the hands of a patriarchal system. Another reason is the increase in general interest in the spiritual, arising from a world of climate change, war and pandemics, where the future can feel uncertain and bleak. How mediumistic art fares on this new stage in the long term remains to be seen, but the outlook is positive. In a relatively short period of time it has attracted a huge amount of interest from curators, collectors, art scholars and the general public, who have attended the shows in their droves.
It is fair to say that the mediumistic art that survives today is not only evidence of communication with another realm, but also evidence of the adversities that these courageous artists had to endure. Over its long history mediumistic art has witnessed great cultural, social and economic shifts. It has held its own with scientific innovation, most notably when science, esotericism and art were preoccupied with making visible the invisible. It is art that, imbued with a spiritual energy, has given joy, inspired others, and most importantly imparted healing and comfort to those in need. It is art that defied materialism and encouraged enchantment with the otherworldly. It demonstrates a challenge to patriarchal structure and has given women an equal or elevated position within the hierarchy not afforded elsewhere in society. It gives no regard to restrictions in age or class. It challenges religious dogma by allowing direct communication with the divine. It has survived the times during which its practitioners defiantly persevered in the face of prosecution under archaic witchcraft laws or from life threatening regimes that forbade engagement with the supernatural. Rather than being ridiculed, dismissed, negated or overlooked, it deserves to be celebrated and allowed to continue to grow and inspire future generations and engage with new audiences who will benefit from its many qualities.
The spiritual and visionary attributes of Madge’s art are finally being fully appreciated, and she deserves a major role in the current revival of mediumistic art. Her art, first produced over a century ago, is still relevant in today’s society and should be regarded as some of the finest examples of the genre. The visualisation of invisible emanating energies, references to music and synaesthesia, wireless communication, astrology and the understanding of public consciousness, eminently reflect cultural, scientific, spiritual and artistic developments of the era in which they were created. Her innovative and fearless approach with regard to the scale of her works is another attribute that warrants acknowledgement. This appreciation is long overdue, and the major exhibition of Madge at the National Museum of Barcelona, along with her inclusion in the 2024 Venice Biennale can be seen as the first steps to a new future of recognition and admiration of her art.