- Venue
- Hunterian Museum & Art Gallery
- Location
- London
The Huntarian Museum at The Royal College of Surgeons is host to Delineating Disease, the new exhibition of work by Lucy Lyons. Throughout her PhD, Lyons has been investigating how drawing, as an activity, can lead to understanding. The subject of this study is a rare congenital disease called Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva, a condition where connective tissue turns to bone. I was lucky enough to receive an invite to preview the show before its opening.
This exhibition presents 30 of Lyons' 66 analytical pencil drawings. The detail in each piece is extraordinarily exquisite. However gruesome this disease, these images are not – they display a genuine sense of humanity. Lyons has worked with living sufferers, drawn from historical skeletons and spent three years working alongside the head of conservation at the Royal College of Surgeons on the maceration and preparation of two donors. This dedication is reflected in every element of her practice. There is no sense of labour in this time consuming study; just a genuine commitment to detail. Some of the drawings appear motionless and analytical; as documentary objects brushed with an allusion of grief, others have a painful realism frayed with anguish. Brittle, sinuous and fibrous, these images attend to every facet of their subject.
Imagery of this style would ordinarily be associated with medical or scientific study; however, this straightforward interpretation is shifted by Lyons' perspective. The purpose of these studies is not to provide records of a particular disease; rather to explain how drawing can be used as a tool to understand the disease. In essence this exhibition is as much, if not more, as study of drawing as it is of Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva.
Medical professionals and scientists have forever relied on drawings to record information. Endless empirical studies were undertaken in Victorian times with the optimism that recording every element of nature would fulfill one's understanding of it. Lyons' work embraces an element of this ideal, however, it does so with a contemporary, astute approach. The understanding that Lyons seeks is more ephemeral in comparison, and is revealed through individual pencil lines and compositions rather than just the image as one completed generic example. Lyons' work embraces a phenomenological philosophy: rather than making initial drawings and sketches with a purpose of developing or improving them in some way, visual experience is observed and presented accurately and continuously throughout the duration of an event. Delineation is seen as presenting the specificity of each unique visual experience and as a method of transmitting information. Although similar to scientific and medical drawings, these images do not have the sense of being purely informative as general models: each of Lyons' studies is individual and therefore presents an understanding of the disease at a particular moment on a particular sufferer.
Lyons draws the object how it appears at a specific point in time – not just the thing-in-itself, but how the thing appears and, more importantly, how it is constructed by the mind. This interpretation is then translated to paper, revealing not only how drawing can lead to understanding, but how it can also be a method of understanding.
