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 currently working on a show of his work that will open in the town where he lived, this scene is far from holy. For them, it is loaded with disturbing overtones.
“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,” says Vivien Almond, one of the survivors involved in the project. “There’s no way out – even the window behind her is tiny.” The image, says Almond, is “all about power – the power that figure has over that young girl invading her space, threatening her. And that’s what Eric Gill was all about.”
