Madge Gill at the William Morris Gallery: Artist who hid work under the bed given London exhibition

A self-taught artist who hoarded her works under the bed in her east London home is the subject of a new exhibition only a few streets from where she was born.

Madge Gill, who worked as a nurse at Whipps Cross Hospital, made thousands of drawings and created huge textiles but rarely showed them in her lifetime and many were only found when she died in 1961.

A selection of her work, which now sells to collectors around the world, will be displayed at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow. An eccentric figure, Gill claimed to make her work while possessed by a spirit called Myrninerest and often drew dozens of pictures in a sitting.

She was born in Walthamstow and lived for a long time in Upton Park, showing some of her work at the nearby Whitechapel Gallery but claimed her spirit told her not to sell her creations. About 2,000 were left to Newham council on her death and a similar amount were believed to have been sold at auction and private sales, ending up in museums and collections around the world.

One sketch from the Fifties sold at Christie’s in New York last year for £8,500. Curator Sophie Dutton has spent four years planning the show, which she described as “a labour of love”, after being introduced to Gill’s work by her late father.

She said: “When I first started looking into it I went to the archive and it is just incredible what they’ve got. It was just knowing there was all this work by someone from the area that wasn’t really being acknowledged or celebrated. I think she matters largely because she was making work with limited resources, she was self-taught, she was outside the mainstream art world and found a way of producing mass amounts of amazing art work.”

Among the work going on show is a section of a monumental 30ft-long multi-coloured calico called Crucifixion Of The Soul, some of the first drawings she made and one of her last sketches.

Rowan Bain, the gallery’s senior curator, said: “Whilst the scale and scope of her work is exhilarating, she also had an extraordinary technical ability.”

Madge Gill is at the William Morris Gallery from June 22 to September 22. If anyone has any information on works by Madge Gill, please contact Sophie Dutton at info@worksbymadgegill.co