‘Drawn to Investigate’ explores the potential of drawing as an investigative tool to make meaningful contributions to knowledge outside the arts.

Solve et Coagula, Emma Hunter (2014)

Curated by Sarah Casey and Gerry Davies from an international open call, it brings together a range of examples of contemporary drawing with a relationship to ‘scientific’ research in contexts around the world. ‘Science’ is used in the most inclusive sense, embracing all forms of thorough investigation, spanning archaeology to astrophysics and anatomy.

Drawing is historically associated with knowledge generation and critical investigation in the sciences. Today, art-science collaboration has become a burgeoning area of interdisciplinary research. The exhibition take a timely look at how drawing today continues to work across the porous boundary between observation and expression, empiricism and invention in a range of investigative practices. This approach builds on John Ruskin’s advocacy of drawing as a way of seeing and understating the world and his prescient understanding of the impact of industrialisation on the natural environment.

Artists included: Hondartza Fraga, Peter Matthews, Jennie Spiers-Grant, Johanna Love, Lesley Hicks, Doris Rohr, Stefan Gant, Dara Rigal, Gemma Anderson, Emma Hunter, Daksha Patel, Julia Midgley, Annalise Rees, Jan Hogan, Vanessa Lucieer, Richard Talbot , Emma Stibbon.

The exhibition is accompanied by a conference on the same theme, Drawing Conversations III, taking place at The Ruskin on 17^th January 2020.