Lines of Enquiry: Thinking through drawing

From the wobbliest doodle to elaborately detailed expositions, the exhibition showed how we use drawing to think through problems, find out how things work, visualise concepts, order information and communicate to other people.

The exhibition included drawings by physicists, geologists, architects, engineers, zoologists, archaeologists, palaeontologists, geneticists, surgeons, historians, philosophers, and composers as well as artists.

Among the drawings were Sir Roger Penrose’s visual reinterpretations of Einstein’s relativity equation, Sir John Sulston’s genome explorations, Sir Colin St John Wilson’s original ideograms for the British Library, Tariq Ahmad’s drawings for plastic reconstruction surgery, Richard Seymour’s 360º drawing of Piccadilly Circus, Richard Deacon’s interlaced layerings, Gerry Gilmore’s back of a letter exposition of the structure of the Milky Way, and Sir Harry Kroto’s discovery of the C60 carbon atom.

The exhibition provided a backdrop to a summer of drawing activity and workshops. Organised by Barry Phipps, it is a development of ‘On the Way to Things’, an exhibition held at Churchill College, Cambridge earlier the same year.