Sarah Gillespie: Antler Moth

Sarah Gillespie was born in Winchester in 1963. She studied 16th & 17th century methods and materials at the Atelier Neo-Medici in Paris before going on to read Fine Art at Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art. Born into a (in her own words) chaotic, creative household, Gillespie says of her childhood that art materials were just always around to be experimented with. That and the fact she spent much of her early years outside, exploring the natural world has been pivotal in the artist path she has taken.

Gillespie’s detailed, monochrome mezzotints celebrate one of the UK’s most elusive insects, the moth. The artist reminds us that ‘moths, as with other insects, are in serious decline. Since I began studying and drawing moths ten years ago, I have felt more and more aware of their importance and the need to record and draw attention to their fragile beauty.”

Mezzotint, meaning ‘half tone’ in Italian, is a engraving technique by which the artist uses a rocker to roughen the whole surface of the plate, making the deep black background, and the lighter and white tones are created using a process of scraping back smoothing the surface. Gillespie describes this process as the ‘art of erosion’ - something she feels speak to the nature of moths “Moths are both there, and not there, present but hidden.”