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New
Moon
20 Dec 2025
Jen
Feroze
‘Little is known about
Gillespie herself’
After Frank Auerbach’s
Head of Helen Gillespie (1962)
She is drowning in layers of herself.
For two years he has worked her
rich in black and white,
scraped her back to canvas,
ghost and bone. The finished work will be
almost sculptural, will win him plaudits.
She can see all herselves. She is itching
she is desperate she is demure. In this fog
of art she is musechildmothercrone.
Her soul is banging against her organs.
His unveiling the heaviest cloak.
Later she walks along Camden High Street,
watching the ease of moon-faced people
on evening buses, envy seething in her stomach.
Again she repeats her shopping list in her head,
can’t shake the feeling
that she has forgotten something upstairs
in that echoing studio.
Behind the poem...
I saw Frank Auerbach‘s oil painting Head of Helen Gillespie at the National Portrait Gallery, and was struck not only by its style – the way he took it through ’hundreds of transmutations‘, building up and scraping back layers of paint – but also by the gallery‘s description of it, which included this throwaway phrase: ’little is known about Gillespie herself‘. Fascinated by this, I wondered whether it was a choice by Auerbach‘s muse to remain largely anonymous, or whether she was being unwillingly overlooked. It raised questions for me about the larger issues of women’s voices being heard in traditionally male spaces. My spotlight on an imagined Gillespie was the result.