Hello and welcome back to the Fen Ditton Gallery podcast, hosted by Hannah Munby. In this episode, I was delighted to interview artist and printmaker Sarah Gillespie who is currently exhibiting at the gallery as part of our Art, Science and the Natural World exhibition. The exhibition brings together three artists who have recently completed an invited residency with the Cambridge Conservation Initiative, focussing on lesser-known IUCN redlist species that are in decline due to environmental change.

Sarah Gillespie was born in Winchester in 1963. She studied 16th & 17th century methods and materials at the Atelier Neo-Medici in Paris before going on to read Fine Art at Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art. Born into (in her own words) a chaotic, creative household, Sarah says that art materials were just always around to be experimented with. That and the fact she spent much of her early years outside, exploring the natural world has been pivotal in the artistic path she has taken.

Sarah’s detailed, monochrome mezzotints celebrate one of the UK’s most elusive insects, the moth. Sarah says :Since I began studying and drawing moths ten years ago, I have felt more and more aware of their importance and the need to record and draw attention to their fragile beauty.” It was during her Cambridge Conservation Initiative residency that Sarah discovered that almost all species of moth (and there are over 2,500) are in serious decline.

In this interview, we chatted about Sarah’s early childhood and the influences that has had on her career, what exactly a mezzotint engraving is, and how she hope her work will be an apology to the natural world for the damage we have caused.

I hope you enjoy this conversation and thank you for listening. To view Sarah’s work and find out more about the exhibition, visit fendittongallery.com