How the challenge of depicting biological systems can generate productive questions for artists and scientists.

An artist sketching cell division faces a problem: what is the best way to visually represent a dynamic process? This anthology, edited by an artist and a philosopher of science, explores drawing as a way of inquiring into living processes at the molecular, cellular, and organismal scale. In doing so, drawing emerges as a tool for relaying and uncovering knowledge—a pathway for research, not an end result.

Incorporating drawing studies and contributions from scholars in the humanities and life sciences, Drawing Processes of Life addresses epigenetics, epistemology, and metamorphosis in insects, proteins, and other ever-shifting biological systems. Fulfilling the promise of an interdisciplinary collaboration between artists and scientists, this book demonstrates the interweaving of processes, scientific, artistic, and non-human that the abstractive techniques of modern science so readily obscure.

Gemma Anderson is a research fellow at the University of Exeter in the Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology and the Living Systems Institute, and a lecturer in drawing at Falmouth University, UK.

John Dupré is Professor of Philosophy of Science and Consulting Director of Egenis centre for the study of life sciences, University of Exeter, UK.