Sophie Parkin is pulled into the magical world of seances, spirits and automatic drawing in anticipation of the witching season, Halloween.
It’s warm for October, for this year’s Frieze. However, there’s still the usual Eurotrash walking around in dead animals and Allen Jones fantasy bootees as if catwalk-Ing out of a dystopian fantasy of black uniforms. Still, we are here for the art, not the social, but social cannot be avoided in this immense swag of people in a tent in Regents Park. Pay attention to the stalls in Frieze Masters. You’ll see, they once again outshine the Modern with staggering Illuminated Manuscripts that jump from the pages of beautifully bound books, Ancient Greek artifacts and Roman death masks that make you think you’re in a museum,( or shouldn’t this be in a museum?), and then you stumble across these extraordinary silver and gold paintings by Yoshida Kenji and discover they are not in a Museum but in The October Gallery.
Yoshida Kenji, an ex-airman of the Japanese army conscripted to be a Kamikaze pilot, miraculously survived. Born in 1924, he died in 2009, lived most of his life in Paris, France and made compelling abstracted spiritual paintings about the Universe and Cosmos; about life force, ‘for me the Universe is a vast living body. All that has life shares the same components, he wrote. Really, what else is there to make art about in a time when war still rages?’
These works are really joyful. Filled with a Fra Angelico tranquillity and yet with an energy that lights up the space, so why have we never seen this work in The Tate, The Serpentine or The Hayward Gallery? It is beyond me. I am not surprised that they are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City- A fantastic gallery, but it’s in Mexico and the British Museum collection. I have written previously about legacy and acknowledgement in both praise and prices, who gets to be remembered after they die, a mix of fate, investment, children and belief. In other words, roll the dice, chance. Do we all get our opportunity as artists to be acknowledged for 15minutes, rarely in our lifetime, and as the Outsider or Brut artists that come from the spiritual side of painting are still to be believed, and they have the spirit world on their side!
Madge Gill is currently riding high on the fashion wave of collection, with the whole of The Gallery of Everything at Frieze dedicated to Gill, run by the insightful James Brett, who has championed and collected Madge and her Theosophical gang for decades. Ms Gill, for let us give this prodigious Walthamstow lady some respect, has been dead as long as I have been alive, and her work was first brought to the public’s attention in 1918. Yes, finally, 64 years after her death and 107 years after being in the paper, The Tate and The National Portrait Gallery, with their public purses, buy a picture each for their collections. I hope her grandchildren have kept a few back, but I fear they all went into the 1980s Christie’s sale that Henry Boxer got his intelligent claws on in an investment that has been a long game of being proven right. Art is cultural gambling, and you can spend your whole life backing the wrong horses, but at least if you love the work, there are more than bookies’ stubs to hang on your wall. Madge Gill’s work is so in demand that Tate announced the purchase of one as part of three new acquisitions made possible through the 2025 Frieze Tate Fund, supported this year by £150,000 in philanthropic contributions.
I love Madge Gill as much for her story (www.MadgeGill.com)as for why she made art, and the art itself, frenetic ink drawings with elegantly attired ladies floating within abstracted landscapes or intensely colourful embroidery. But the story of how she came to be part of the spiritual life of Upton Park after escaping domestic servitude in Canada, she was sent by Dr Barnardo’s as an illegitimate child into service, as part of this government’s idea of peopling its Commonwealth with the British, without the consent of either child or her mother. And yet she made it back to London aged 20, to hold seances, have visions and make incredible work, thousands of pieces, be a mother and be the servant of her spiritual guide, Myrninerest, whose name she signed her work with. Yet it has still taken 64years after her death to be recognised. Is this because she’s a woman, or because she refused to take part in the art game other than to show at The Whitechapel Gallery as an amateur, she wouldn’t sell her work, or because Newham Borough Council has the most extensive collection? Whatever the reason, now she’s got her foot in the door. Hooray, she’s part of British art history.
There are also other spiritual occurrences happening at The College Of Psychic Studies, The Medium is the Message, artists as Mediums and feminist visionaries. This is pure joy and an opportunity to snoop around an excellent collection, if only for the truly heavenly Ethel de Rossignol, who only ever made 44 pieces between 1920 and 1933, 21 of which are part of the College’s collection.. And there is also Swedenborg House, Bloomsbury, in an interesting show curated by Stephen McNeilly called Elective Affinities, pairing the living work with the dead.
Leonora Carrington’s 1942 etching, which shows up next to Marcelle Hanselaar, very alive, At the Oracle of Limbo, 2019. There are also books, sculptures, drawings, and gramophone records evoking a wonderful otherworldliness of spiritual connection from the gallery into the library through to the bookshop. Wander into a world of dreams as you drift through Emmanuel Swedenborg’s home, for you have surely entered another dimension where the art market and Frieze seem to be part of an entirely different existence, as if never the twain shall meet, but they do. It is not part of this William Blake world, but maybe that is the point, pure art transports you away from the glittering coalface of capitalism on a magical train journey full of angels and whispering spirit beings. Sometimes it’s hard to decipher which is real life.
My thanks go to Outsider Art Magazine, Vivienne Roberts’s obsession with Madge Gill and her excellent website. The College of Psychic Studies, South Kensington, and The Les Halles Saint Pierre Brut Museum of Paris, for showing art that is almost outside the gallery system, but has more feeling than Le Grande Palais. James Brett and The Gallery of Everything, and to his compulsive obsession with the outsiders of the art world like Bob Parks, Austin Osman Spare, Madge Gill and all of his works of celestial evidence that proclaim the other realm through art, photography, ceramics and sculpture. And Emmanuel Swedenborg for keeping his house open.
Ectoplasmix at The Gallery of Everything 4 Chiltern St, W1 @Gallevery until 30/11/25 open daily.
The October Gallery represents Yoshida Kenji -La Vie. 24 Old Gloucester St, WC1 (current show El Anatsui – Go Back and Pick until Nov.)
Elective Affinities – Swedenborg House 20 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1 until Feb 27 2026
The Medium is the Message – The College of Psychic Studies, 16 Queensberry Place, South Kensington – until Jan 31st.