SARAH GILLESPIE
mezzotint engraving 7” x 5”
#17/20
"Everything begins with stepping outside. The whole work is how to step over one’s threshold, outside of one’s self, and in so doing make enough space to allow existence – specifically the existence of the more than human world - to presence itself. All my work engages either with fellow sentient beings or familiar places here in Devon, so walking, drawing, memory and long, careful observation play a crucial role.
The natural world once you start to really see it can be overwhelming and one has to be calm and make selections, be still, take heed, pay attention, wait... One is looking, always looking for how much one can see and then leave out in order for the drawing to find its poetic resonance. whole becomes – much as moths and trees already are - a mystic dance between the interior life and exterior weather. As much as you might draw forth, the world in all her tangled glory reveals herself.
I relish difficult, or even obsolete methods and materials. The difficulty is important - there is something to be said for a lack of choices, or the deliberate limiting of choices. Something interesting is always revealed in renunciation. For me when I gave up colour, elements usually hidden, or more accurately passed-over in the landscape became present to me in the secrets and details of the woods and water, moths, hares and birds. I simply saw more if I wasn’t busy mixing colours. Without wishing to self-agrandise, I would like in attending to advocate for the more-than-human world, for the fragility of our disappearing moths, the complex beauty of trees, for what little is left of what is natural and wild on these islands. I believe, to misquote Yeats, that we ache to press our hearts against what remains of loveliness and I am absolutely not interested in self expression"
Gillespie studied 16 & 17C methods and materials at the Atelier Neo-Medici in Paris and then read Fine Art at Pembroke College Oxford (BFA Ruskin School of Drawing & fine Art.)
On leaving Oxford, she was awarded both the Egerton Coghill prize for landscape painting and the Elizabeth Greenshield Foundation International Award for figurative art. For many years she enjoyed a successful career as a painter; represented in London by first Waterhouse & Dodd and then Beaux Arts. Now represented by Rabley Gallery, her work is widely collected by museums and individuals both here and abroad. She is regularly selected and hung at the Royal Academy Summer Show. In 2016 she was elected a member of the Royal West of England Academy.
In 2021 the V&A London acquired the entire suite of her Moth mezzotints for its permanent collection. The Shanghai Xuihui Museum Fine Art in China followed suit with a large acquisition in the same year.
Exeter Museum RAAM and Pallant House and Chippenham Museum have all acquired mezzotints in recent years, and in 2022 the National Portrait Gallery commissioned a mezzotint for permanent display in their newly refurbished galleries
Her drawings have long been concerned with the landscape around her home in Devon – specifically the wetlands of Slapton Ley, but her most recent work in mezzotint has focussed on British moths - the gradual drawing forth of the image from the darkness seeming a perfect matching of method to subject.