Sarah Gillespie
Sarah Gillespie studied 16 & 17C methods and materials in Paris and went on to read Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art, Oxford University (Pembroke Coll.).
On leaving Oxford, she was awarded both the Egerton Coghill prize & The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation International Award for figurative art.
Following many years working and exhibiting widely as a painter, in 2012 she abandoned oil painting and returned to drawing and printmaking, specializing in the centuries-old art of mezzotint engraving. Gillespie is regularly selected and hung at the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Show and is an RWA Academician.
Always predominantly a landscape painter, her interest in moths grew from an acute awareness of wildlife collapse bought about by pesticide use, habitat loss and man-made climate change. She has said that moths are ‘the canaries in the coalmine’ of the climate and biodiversity catastrophe before us.
In 2021 the V&A acquired the entire suite of her Moth mezzotints for its permanent collection. In 2022 she undertook a residency in the David Attenborough Building at Cambridge University, to look at moths on the brink of extinction. The resulting image of a now critically endangered Bordered Gothic moth subsequently being purchased by the Fitzwilliam for their permanent collection
Her mezzotints drew the attention of both the China Museum and The Shanghai Xuihui Museum Fine Art in China. Both museums have exhibited and acquired moth mezzotints.
The British Museum, La Bibliothèque National de France; Pallant House Museum, and The Holburne Museum amongst others, have all acquired her work and in 2022 the National Portrait Gallery commissioned a mezzotint and film for permanent display in their newly refurbished galleries.
In 2025 she completed a drawing commission for the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery, Exeter, looking directly at the 90% decline in Arctia caja, The Great Tiger Moth and in 2026 she contributed to the research for the V&A’s Constable/Lucas 250year celebration “A unison of feeling” and exhibited two of her own mezzotints in the museum alongside those of John Constable.
Sarah also writes on mezzotint, drawing and moths, frequently and happily collaborating with poets and naturalists.
Consistently uninterested in ideas of self-expression or identity, her most recent works are large-scale drawings celebrating the shimmering, hidden lives of an animate, watching world,
Sarah Gillespie 2026