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No way out Survivors of abuse help gallery take on Eric Gill's cruel legacy
The Guardian
|April 19, 2025
A young girl kneels on her bedroom floor, hands pressed together, as another figure towers over her, one arm raised. This watercolour, made by Eric Gill, is titled Annunciation - but for the abuse survivors working on a show of his work that will open in the town where he lived, this scene is far from holy.
"What I see isn't the Virgin Mary and the Angel Gabriel. It's a scared little girl in a room where she ought to feel safe, with a terrifying figure looming over her, blocking the exit," said Vivien Almond, one of the survivors involved in the project. "There's no way out - even the window behind her is tiny."
Almond knows what she's talking about: as a child, she was sexually abused by her own father over many years, just as Gill's two elder daughters Betty and Petra were - a fact that didn't come to light until a biography by Fiona MacCarthy was published in 1989.
This story is from the April 19, 2025 edition of The Guardian.
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