Gillespie studied 16 & 17C methods and materials at the Atelier Neo-Medici in Paris and then read Fine Art at Pembroke College Oxford (BFA Ruskin School of Drawing & fine Art). On leaving Oxford, she was awarded both the Egerton Coghill prize for landscape painting and the Elizabeth Greenshield Foundation International Award for figurative art. For many years she enjoyed a successful career as a painter; represented in London by first Waterhouse & Dodd and then Beaux Arts. Her work is widely collected by museums and individuals both here and abroad. She is regularly selected and hung at the Royal Academy Summer Show. In 2016 she was elected a member of the Royal West of England Academy. Now specialising in the centuries old art of mezzotint engraving, in 2019 she won the prize for ‘adhering to the skills and traditions of the medium’, at the International Mezzotint Festival in Yekaterinburg, Russia.
In 2022 Chippenham Museum, Exeter Museum RAAM and Pallant House all acquired mezzotints.
In 2023 the National Portrait Gallery commissioned a mezzotint for permanent display in their newly refurbished galleries
Her drawings have long been concerned with the landscape around her home in Devon – specifically the wetlands of Slapton Ley, but her most recent work in mezzotint has focussed on British moths – the gradual drawing forth of the image from the darkness seeming a perfect matching of method to subject. She says of this work: ‘The method itself holds meaning for me somewhere around its ability to speak both literally and poetically of the moths, (or landscape), being neither present, nor absent but always both. Here and not here. Also, because one is working in mirror and from dark to light and without line, there are, in the long hours of making, many when it is not at all clear whether one – the artist – is indeed ‘drawing forth’ or whether the moth – subject – is revealing herself. There is much more of a play, a conversation between these two possibilities than in some other mediums and I value that exchange more than I can say’.
Text source: The Artist
