Madge Gill: The Arcana Drawings brings together a jewel-like series of twenty-two ink drawings on postcards. Modest in scale yet central to Gill's practice, these intimate works function as transmissions: part vision, part message, part meditation. Created across decades marked by war, uncertainty and personal adversity, they can be understood as missives from another realm, carrying themes of healing, hope and transformation.
Gill developed her vast and deeply personal visual language through automatic drawing, spiritualist belief and extraordinary artistic instinct. Claiming that her hand was guided by a spirit presence she called Myrninerest, she produced densely detailed compositions in which enigmatic female faces, abstract forms and rhythmic patterns emerge and dissolve. Each postcard is unique, yet together they form a coherent visual cosmos that reveals the remarkable consistency and originality of Gill's mark-making.
Selected from a single private collection, the twenty-two works have been selected to evoke the idea of the arcana: hidden knowledge, mysteries and symbolic systems of meaning. The number itself invites esoteric associations. Like the twenty-two Major Arcana cards of the tarot, or the twenty-two paths of wisdom connecting the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, these drawings suggest a journey through states of consciousness, intuition and revelation. In numerology, twenty-two is the "Master Builder" number, representing the ability to unite spiritual insight with practical action in service of a greater purpose.
The postcard format adds another layer of meaning. Familiar, portable and designed to carry messages across distance, postcards were a form Gill frequently used, often giving them to friends, family and visitors as tokens of connection. In this context, each drawing becomes both image and correspondence - a message passed from hand to hand, carrying the otherworldly energies Gill believed flowed through her work.
More than sixty years after her death, these extraordinary works continue to resonate with contemporary audiences. They speak not only of spiritual enquiry and hidden knowledge, but also of resilience, imagination and the desire to bring meaning to a troubled world. Gill believed she had been entrusted with a mission. The Arcana Drawings invites us to consider these small but powerful works as fragments of that lifelong endeavour and a key to expanding our own ideas of perception.
