Nottingham's cultural landscape has quietly become one of the most exciting in the Midlands, with Lakeside Arts consistently bringing ambitious exhibitions to the city that challenge how audiences engage with contemporary art. Its latest exhibition, Drawn Through Time, is no exception. Housed within the Djanogly Gallery at the University of Nottingham, the exhibition takes what many might consider the simplest of artistic practices – drawing – and transforms it into something far richer: a way of navigating history, memory and imagination.
From the moment visitors enter the gallery, it becomes clear that this is not an exhibition to rush through, for every room encourages a slower, more deliberate way of looking. It feels less like entering a conventional exhibition and more like stepping into an unfolding conversation between artists separated by centuries.
At the heart of Drawn Through Time lies the work of Penny McCarthy, whose meticulous graphite drawings explore the ways in which images, objects and histories continue to resonate across time. Her practice forms the exhibition's conceptual anchor, bringing together Renaissance masterpieces, contemporary drawing and personal reflection into a remarkably coherent whole.
Facing her work is one of the exhibition's greatest treasures: Titian's sixteenth-century woodcut The Submersion of Pharaoh's Army in the Red Sea. Rarely displayed due to its fragility, the monumental print depicts the biblical moment when the waters return to engulf the Egyptian army after Moses leads the Israelites to safety. Historically, drawing was often regarded as preparatory work for painting, yet Titian's ambitious woodcut challenged those assumptions, elevating the medium to the scale and significance of history painting itself.
Rather than simply responding to Titian's work, McCarthy enters into dialogue with it. Working over several years from digital fragments and close observation, she painstakingly reconstructed the monumental composition through drawing, producing a work that is neither replica nor reproduction but an act of sustained engagement.
These artists are drawing time itself – preserving fragile histories while imagining futures
As curator Ashley Gallant observes, "Drawing helps you relate to history or helps you see better."
That simple statement becomes the guiding philosophy of the exhibition. Throughout the opening gallery, graphite drawings reveal extraordinary acts of looking. One work captures fog drifting across the Venetian lagoon, rendering something almost impossible to define into tangible form through thousands of patient marks. Another depicts nothing more extraordinary than dust collected on a laptop screen, yet under McCarthy's gaze the tiny particles resemble distant galaxies, transforming the microscopic into the cosmic. Looking closely, the exhibition suggests, is itself a creative act.
The gallery design reinforces this invitation to linger. Sunlight interacts with graphite, causing surfaces to shift throughout the day, while delicate glass casts of tree branches occupy the centre of the room. Created by burning away the original wood during the casting process, the sculptures preserve natural forms through their destruction, embodying one of the exhibition's recurring ideas: that preservation and loss are often inseparable.
As visitors move deeper into the exhibition, the atmosphere changes. The bright openness of the first gallery gives way to darker, more intimate spaces where repeated visual motifs begin to emerge across different artists' works. James Pyman's illustrations inspired by Dracula offer one such encounter. Rather than depicting moments of horror directly, his drawings focus on empty staircases, deserted buildings and quiet landscapes that suggest narrative without revealing it. Their restraint proves unsettling. Like the Gothic novel itself, what remains absent becomes more haunting than what is shown.
Nearby, Jonathan Owen approaches drawing through erasure. Working from printed historical imagery, he meticulously removes figures while leaving their surroundings intact, transforming absence into presence. The resulting compositions feel strangely inhabited, demonstrating that removal can be as expressive as addition. His practice echoes one of the exhibition's broader concerns: that history is often defined as much by what disappears as by what survives.
Memory itself takes centre stage in Emma Kay's remarkable hand-drawn map of the world, created entirely from recollection. Continents drift slightly out of place, coastlines distort and familiar geographies become unexpectedly uncertain. Rather than exposing failure, these inaccuracies reveal the deeply personal nature of memory. The map becomes less a record of the world than a portrait of how knowledge is carried, forgotten and reconstructed over time.
Among the exhibition's most compelling contemporary voices is Billy Hughes, whose photorealistic drawings reinterpret found photographs, technical manuals and religious imagery. Removed from their original contexts, ordinary illustrations become quietly ambiguous, inviting viewers to question how meaning is constructed. Hughes extends this exploration further by incorporating artificial intelligence into his process, using AI-generated interpretations as the basis for painstaking hand-drawn works. Rather than presenting technology as a replacement for artistic skill, his practice demonstrates how traditional craftsmanship can engage critically with new forms of image-making.
In an era increasingly dominated by digital production, Drawn Through Time offers a timely reminder of the value of the human hand. Gallant argues that drawing remains fundamental not simply because of its technical discipline but because it demands sustained attention – an increasingly rare quality in contemporary life.
The exhibition reaches an emotionally resonant conclusion through the work of George Shaw. Best known for chronicling the Coventry estate where he grew up, Shaw transforms suburban woodland into spaces of myth, memory and psychological reflection. Inspired by Renaissance landscapes while rooted firmly in working-class Britain, his forests become places where childhood experience and cultural history intersect. Installed together, the works surround visitors with an atmosphere that is at once familiar and strangely uncanny, suggesting that every remembered place contains layers of personal and collective history.
By the time visitors return to the gallery entrance, the exhibition's title begins to reveal its full meaning. These artists are not simply drawing through time; they are drawing time itself – tracing connections between past and present, preserving fragile histories and imagining futures through the oldest of artistic practices.
For Nottingham, rather than asking audiences to admire technical brilliance alone, the exhibition encourages them to reconsider drawing as a way of understanding the world – one line, one memory and one careful observation at a time.
Visit Drawn Through Time at Lakeside Arts’ Djanogly Gallery until Sunday 26 July.
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