Moths emerging from the night: a conversation with artist Sarah Gillespie
Luminous, velvety, miraculously detailed, Moths — a series of mezzotints created by UK artist Sarah Gillespie — invites the viewer to contemplate the mystery of these winged night creatures. Here, Gillespie reveals how moths captured her fascination after a lifetime of painting landscapes, why mezzotint and moths go so well together, and why we should be paying attention to them now.
12 min readApr 2, 2020
Tell me something about yourself and your background.
I’m an artist, not an entomologist — nor do I have a background in natural history. But I’ve always lived in the countryside, apart from the years when I was studying. I’ve always walked and I’ve had the habit of solitude, really, so looking at nature is part of my DNA. I don’t even like saying “looking at nature” because it implies a subject-object dualism, which I’m not interested in. I did want to study biology, but I come from the era when they wouldn’t let you do both sciences and arts. You had to choose.
