The Grant Museum of Zoology has a long history as a teaching collection where students have furthered their understanding of evolution by studying the physical form of a multitude of specimens. Drawing Life brings the lessons of ecology from the field into the museum, and explores the dynamic relationships between organisms in their habitats.
The processes by which animals interact with each other and their habitat are as defining of life as their physical forms. Unfortunately, much of what we know remains obscured by the mysterious languages of diagrams, graphs, and equations. Drawing – traces of what we sense, maps of our thoughts, records of our actions – will be used to link personal meaning to these abstract formulae, allowing audiences to investigate the relationships of nature through exploring the museum’s collections.
This collaboration between researcher Dr Joey O’Gorman and the Grant Museum is funded by the Arts Council under the auspices of Share Academy, which is a partnership between University College London, University of the Arts London and the London Museums Group. The Share Academy project aims to build sustainable and mutually beneficial relationships between the higher education sector and specialist museums in London. The public workshops have been developed in collaboration with MA Art and Science students from Central Saint Martins College, UAL.
Join the Drawing Life workshops and find out how the act of drawing can unlock the complex relationships at work in nature. We will immerse ourselves in ecology while exploring the wonderful specimens in the collection. Each workshop will bring to life a new ecological concept, join us for just one or come to all three to discover more about the rules of the natural world and experiment with new ways of seeing.
Contact firstname.lastname@example.org if you have any work from past events which you would like to share.