On drawing as a way of knowing

This chapter focuses on drawing as a way of knowing that requires engagement with scientific collections and specimens. As an artist, I have been working with museum specimens since 2006, mainly studying the resemblance between animal, mineral and vegetable species through the collections of The Natural History Museum, Kew Gardens and University College London. This work has been based on the hypothesis that a group of underlying morphological characteristics (forms and symmetries) are shared by animal, mineral and vegetable species.

Although this work is nested in the emerging field of 'drawing research', it is distinctive in its proposal of observational and conceptual drawing practice as a way of knowing form and formative process, as inspired by Goethe's morphology. Thus, the recursive nature of this research relates to what Daniel Zeller identifies as a goal of artistic research 'to discover a new vocabulary and new rules that can be incorporated back into the process, like a feedback loop, allowing the cycle to expand and evolve' (Zeller 2011).

Artistic research generally, and drawing in particular, is now recognized as a form of interrogation (Holert 2011). In this work, I employ drawing as a method to interrogate the forms, symmetries and formations of animal, mineral and vegetable structures and to offer 'artistic visualization as critique' (Ambrosio 2014: 134–37). Building on this initial framework, more specific details of how these methods have been developed and then shared with others are outlined in each of the subsequent chapters of this book.

A short note on objectivity

At this point, let me elaborate on the concept of objectivity, which will assist the understanding of the nature of this artistic practice within a scientific context. The purpose here is not to critique science or to diminish its aspirations, but to encourage a thoughtful understanding of its nature and to make the links between scientific practice and artistic practice clearer: artistic practice cannot be purely subjective just as scientific practice cannot be purely objective; rather, both have elements of subjectivity and objectivity at the same time.

If we look back a few centuries, the Enlightenment programme depended on the disenchantment of nature (Ravetz 1989: 105), but it did not depend on objectivity, at least not as we conceive the term today. Daston and Galison propose that objectivity was introduced around 1830 as a conceptual framework for looking, seeing and representing that lasted until the middle of the twentieth century (2010: 371). They also establish that rather than objectivity being an enduring foundational framework within which scientists have always operated, it actually only lasted for around one hundred years before being replaced in the mid-twentieth century by the idea of the 'trained judgment' of skilled experts who have undergone an educational and practical training programme appropriate to their chosen field (Daston and Galison 2010: 309–63). In Art, Science and Cultural Understanding, Brett Wilson refers to Daston and Galison (2010: 260–61) when he describes the sustained attachment to the concept of objectivity, saying that

[...] the frequently-repeated sentiments of contemporary scientists that their theories and experimental work are all based on some form of 'objective reality' that can be independently accessed by carefully structured experiments and the removal of personal bias is a position that effectively conflates two separate philosophical stances: that of structural objectivity, as outlined above, coupled to scientific realism, which claims that scientific theories are not just useful, but true in some sort of absolute sense.

(Wilson et al. 2014: 15)

Science now seems to be abandoning the idea of an absolute and unchanging truth as implied by disembodied scientific realism, and relies instead on a more flexible narrative based on internal consistency, testability and falsifiability.

Drawing as a way of knowing

In what follows, I open a discussion of drawing, touching upon various subjects: drawing and decision-making, observational drawing, drawing and memory, drawing and the tacit, drawing and the haptic. This discussion aims to build a rationale for drawing as a way of knowing. As a practice that can generate and communicate knowledge across disciplines, drawing is employed throughout this work to investigate, synthesize and communicate the shared forms and symmetries of animal, mineral and vegetable species. The process of drawing can 'make visible' (Klee 1973: 21) relations between things that otherwise remain invisible. As an embodied, volitional activity, drawing involves more than can be expressed in language. The later section 'Drawing and the tacit' aims to capture the explicit aspects of this connection and to account for aspects of the practice that resist systematic description.

This matrix provides an overview of the range of methods involved in this study, which are discussed in detail in the following sections.

Drawing and decision-making

When reflecting on the personal and experience-led drawing process, in which the subject and the object are constantly being negotiated, I am reminded of Nietzsche's statement: 'There are no facts, only interpretations' (Nietzsche 2011: 89). Scientific work often aims to neutralize any subjective mediation involved in interpretation, whereas in this work the subjectivity of drawing enables the selection of what is interpreted whilst remaining connected to the observation of 'objective' morphological characteristics. Drawing creates a communicable common ground where these morphological characteristics can be negotiated and re-positioned, and this is a useful exercise for art as well as science. In this way, drawing offers a particular form of objectivity: one that allows for the priorities of the individual. The lived character of drawing experience requires a first-person perspective on the object of study. Also the interplay between subjective and objective work is central to this practice, which will sometimes be described from a first-person perspective.

In Objectivity, Daston and Galison identify concrete practices of abstract reason by Enlightenment naturalists as 'selecting, comparing, judging, generalizing' (2010: 70). Drawing involves continuous selective decision-making over time, and feedback between the drawer and the drawn. As the driver of the drawing, the human is both the technology and the mediator. Drawing – as mediation – is different to a photograph or digital image because there is no (non-biological) mechanism or external process between...