Sarah Gillespie – I saw the Moon, wandering asleep among the reeds

New!

Sarah Gillespie writes of her experience that underpins her mesmerisingly new mezzotint edition. ‘I saw the Moon, wandering asleep among the reeds’, 2025. Only this difficult 17th Century printmaking technique, engraved into copper, hold such rich tonal beauty!

Against the optical grey of a now backlit France Woods, Goat Willows fan out, each of their fine dark lines offering up a last few perfect ovals of bronze. Opposite me the bark of a young sycamore is smooth and umber, the opposing symmetry of her buds as yet un-wrecked by salt and time. The parent tree to my right, chaotic & dark reaches out to a graceful Ash – the same grey green as the far woods I note – but darker. In her branches a robin, effortlessly singing the spaces between things. Glancing down at the open page in my lap, I despair at my pencil lines, pathetically tethered attempts to outline and describe. What am I doing here?

I no longer draw to record or gather information, the great privilege of drawing, as John Berger has said, is that a drawing of a tree is not a tree, nor is it me, nor even an expression of me. It is a drawing of a tree being looked at. It contains the experience of looking.

Sarah Gillespie makes mezzotint prints, an old, slow and painstaking method that produces unique velvet blacks and soft tones. Her work encourages us to refocus our gaze toward the everyday and the overlooked; moths, blackbirds and winter-suns.