Sarah Gillespie

I work on paper in black and white and subtle shades of brown and grey. Such limitation demands a different form of looking to the immediate win offered by more overt colours. Instead I am looking for an emotional delicacy, hoping to offer intimations of frail beauty, fleeting pleasures and the delicate poetry of a shadow.

It is my hope, through a process of long-looking and close attention - focusing on quieter moments of beauty and oft hidden lives - to reveal something of the natural world’s remaining loveliness and, in so doing, to see what answering grace that might awaken in ourselves.

“Focusing on just a few locations and subjects Gillespie draws us into a world where we find ourselves mesmerised by moments of everyday beauty and interconnectedness….The charcoal and ink Gillespie uses to conjure up these intricate drawings perfectly capture the fleeting character of her subject matter, their essentially fugitive and fluid substance leaving a trace that seems to caress the paper rather than physically imposing itself on the surface. She can achieve the most dazzling darks imaginable with charcoal, but there is always the feeling that these areas of intense black are on the cusp of dissolving into light, or being blown away on a gust of wind.

'Gillespie allows us to see things in almost forensic detail, and yet as we look at these drawings and investigate the worlds they bring to light, we come to realise a startling truth - that Gillespie is in reality an abstract artist. Her works are not about making faithfully accurate copies of the physical world. They are about making visible the invisible and giving form to the intangible.'
- Revd. Richard Davey

Website: www.sarahgillespie.co.uk, sarahgillespieartist.blogspot.co.uk