Sarah Gillespie

“Mezzotint is a labour of love. I was drawn to it as a method in the first place because of its difficulty. It is ancient, slow and gradual, with a unique, almost alchemical quality to what happens between copper, paper and ink. There are few opportunities to impose oneself, to splash gesture and ego. Beyond that, the gradual drawing forth of the moths from the darkness seemed a perfect matching of method to subject. 

The method itself holds meaning for me somewhere in its ability to speak literally and poetically of our winged nocturnal neighbours being neither present nor absent but always both. Here and not here… Also, because I’m working in mirror and from dark to light and without line, there are, in the long hours of making, many when it’s not at all clear if I’m ‘drawing forth’ or if the moth is revealing itself. There’s much more of a play, a conversation between these alternating possibilities. Either way, it’s the revelation – and the illumination – that’s important. 

For me, there is in the short lives of moths - Quakers, Ermines and Tigers - a glory that comes from their participation in the whole complex, entangled fabric of life. Their fragility speaks urgently of the dark, of the earth, of our own bones, of all we cannot see. Modern life is brightly lit and yet we are sleepwalking into ecological catastrophe. In losing our wild neighbours, and make no mistake we are losing them fast, we lose something wild and precious in ourselves. It is catastrophe we might yet avoid if we but open our eyes and attend to the commonest things by which we are surrounded.

This practice of paying focused attention to the more-than-human world is both devotional and subversive. I choose mezzotint, a practice that is stubbornly ‘anti modern’, because printmaking has a proud history as a radical, subversive art form. My devotion to the moths is less easily put into words…”