Sarah Gillespie: ‘Birded and Eyed’

'Birded and Eyed' a solo exhibition by Sarah Gillespie featuring mezzotints and drawings inspired by the hidden life of the natural world.

“The woods are dark now, birded and eyed.”

Kestle Barton presents our second solo exhibition by Sarah Gillespie, bringing together new works in mezzotint and drawing. The exhibition takes its title from a line by the American poet Jane Hirshfield, reflecting Gillespie’s ongoing attention to the animate, watchful presence of the natural world.

Developed through sustained observation of the woods, meadows and night-life around both Kestle Barton and the artist’s home in Devon, these works continue Gillespie’s distinctive exploration of moths and other small, often overlooked, inhabitants of these environments. Her practice is rooted in close looking — an attentiveness to fragility, pattern and transformation — where the act of drawing becomes a way of registering both physical detail and a more elusive sense of encounter.

Working primarily in mezzotint, a printmaking process known for its depth of tone and capacity for subtle gradation, Gillespie brings a particular intensity to her subjects. Moths emerge from dark grounds, their wings and markings rendered with precision yet retaining a sense of movement and impermanence. Alongside these prints, drawings extend this enquiry, tracing the forms and rhythms of the surrounding landscape. A group of ‘spent’ copper etching plates from the artist’s studio will also be on display, offering further insight into the printing process and existing as objects of quiet material presence in their own right.

As with her previous exhibition at Kestle Barton in 2020, Gillespie’s work is closely connected to the specific ecology of the place. The gallery, set within a former farmstead and surrounded by cultivated gardens and wild margins, provides a context in which these images resonate — not as isolated studies but as part of a wider, living environment. The exhibition invites a slower mode of looking, attuned to cycles of light and darkness, presence and disappearance.