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Podcast: The Essay
Episode: Madge Gill
Description: Unconventionality is a quality celebrated in art, and no-one demonstrates it better than Madge Gill. Psychologist Prof Victoria Tischler explores this mesmerising artist's work.Her embroidered calicos, some 40 metres in length are full of elegant black lines filling every space of the fabric, in patterns that appear to form a winding staircase and chequerboard tiles, similar to those that would have been fashionable in the Victorian and Edwardian times in which she lived. The fact that Gill became an artist at all was unconventional enough. Born out of wedlock in the working class east end...