‘Underwing’ | Solo show of Moths by Sarah Gillespie
“I didn’t choose the moths - they arrived in search of me”
-Sarah Gillespie
Being out in the sticks it is a breathless moment when a show of this gravitas opens in my very own tiny town. Rabley Gallery’s exhibition of ‘Underwing’ opened last week and I was able to attend the PV. Yet more excitingly, I have booked into the Gallery Event by Sarah Gillespie on 15th June where she demonstrates and explains her mezzotint techniques. https://rableygallery.com/
I was enthralled by Gillespie’s work, the observation and restraint. So much strength in her work and conveyed with a gentle compassion for her subject. We are sometimes drawn intuitively (a word I use with strict caution) through a non verbal wisdom of those things unknown but also a ‘somewhere within known’, which leads to the warm realisation that her work is underpinned by the same concerns as my own.
I urgently wanted to buy the Four Spotted Footman print, the last of a limited edition of 20, but decided the money was better retained for my MA fees... Ho hum. I thought it would look amazing in my small collection of moths, including a print I bought by Peter Randall-Page RA at a group show in which I participated. Collecting moths seems to dangerously border on the weird collector curio, but as much as I don’t see myself as a creepy moth fancier - moths feel symbolic of a greater, terrestrial concern. Moths are misunderstood, overlooked and somewhat unloved. Even the bible states “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt”.
From ‘Moth’, by Sarah Gillespie:
Extinctions: there have been over 60 moth extinctions in Britain since 1914 and over the past 35 years the overall number of moths on our islands has fallen by a third. The Garden Tiger, whose caterpillars are the main food of our much-missed cuckoos have fallen by 80% or more
Rachel Carson “The more we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we have for destruction”. Gillespie says: “so this is my response, my rebellion. If what I have been given is the ability to focus, to pay attention, and if there is even the remotest chance that in attending lies an atidote to our careless destruction, then that is what I have to do - to focus. It’s not enough, but it’s necessary”.
In conversation with writer Gay Watson, Gay says: “There’s a wonderful passage in an essay called ‘Serious Noticing’ … by James Wood. The slow death that we deal to the world by the sleep of our inattention is disturbed by the reawakening of our attention.. to notice is to rescue, to redeem…” Gillespie responds: “I’m not sure I would give drawing those powers - of redemption or of rescue - but it does feel to me - when I am working and deep in concentration - something like an apology. Or, as the Buddhists might say, a bow.”
I am struck by this - a) because I would give drawing those powers and b) the idea of a deep bow as an act of rebellion exhilarates me more than I can say
She then goes on to describe how actually maybe drawing does have those powers (I like to think): “… and the world is full of amazing things. We can choose to remain ignorant, or we can sharpen our senses and allow our world to be altered. The great gift of drawing is that one sits still and the hands are occupied, so the old chattering brain tends to calm down adn then all kinds of things reveal themselves. We so often believe ourselves to be so firmly the centre of the universe, we think that we have to be very active and interrogate appearances. Instead I try and sit down with a sketchbook with the thought, ‘let the ten thousand things come to you’.”
GW then discusses how an ‘attentive’ artistic process comes from the Latin ‘ad’ and ‘tendere’ meaning to stretch out towards. Tendrils of meaning stretch out in all directions: to be present, to accompany, to take care of, to listen, to expect, to tend. Attention is so central for us, yet so often, like the moth, unseen and untended. She says “An attentive stance towards the world is more humble and more open, and also much stranger, and further from our everyday understanding the more we realise the extent of our ordinary inattention. Beyond attention lies engagement, but attention comes first”.
SG responds “Be quiet and attend to what is here. Drawing then becomes not only a way of speaking about the world but also an engagement with the world. It’s a way of bringing forth a world that refuses to be reduced to objects but is laden with meaning. Let me explain what happens when I’m drawing. After several hours of close attention, I might - just might - experinece a distinct dropping away of a sense of self. I experience it as a great reflief. I become, as I negotiate the branches or shifts in pattern and tone at the edge of a wing, entangled - a part of the complexity.” She continues… “John Berger described that moment of concentration in drawing as being ‘like a ball thrown and caught’, but it’s deeper than that. There’s no subject and object, no viewer and viewed. There’s just that turn, this edge, that light, this shadow, the edge of that shadow, this hand, this carbon, this breath… and somehow in that space, the being of the moth becomes present… It feels like a pulse or a shared heartbeat”.
In closing, SG sums up: “Art, like poetry, is of no interest when it comes from the self - only when it comes from beyond”.