Situated Drawing: Cartographies of Practice

Expanded Drawing Across Laboratory, Studio, and Exhibition

Abstract

This article examines expanded drawing as a situated practice operating across laboratory, studio, and exhibition environments. Developed through sustained collaboration with neuroscientists Dr Heiko Wurdak and Dr Sabrina Samuel (Stem Cell & Brain Tumour Group, Leeds Institute of Medical Research, St James’s, University of Leeds), whose work engages cellular imaging technologies, the research asks how drawing can maintain methodological rigour while working with visual conditions that are partial, unstable, and continually in formation.

Through practice-led case studies, the article analyses how segmentation, time-lapse microscopy, projection, and material experimentation reconfigure drawing as a method of relational tracing rather than representation. These approaches introduce fragmentation, temporal unfolding, and shifting scale, which drawing does not resolve but actively navigates.

Framed as a cartography of practice, expanded drawing is positioned as a situated methodology that produces knowledge through specific conditions of observation, material engagement, and encounter. The article argues that drawing’s rigour lies not in fixed outcomes, but in its sustained attention to these conditions, establishing it as a critical method for mapping relations that remain open, provisional, and unresolved.