This co-authored paper surveys practices of drawing used in collaboration with specialist practitioners in non fine art disciplines. It will layout a group of artists who enter into dialogue with other research professionals outside the creative arts to address a common concern. We are interested in how this type of drawing can disrupt established ways of thinking both within the disciplines that it engages with and effect change in drawing itself.

This is a timely undertaking: there are a growing number of artists seeking conversation and dialogue outside fine art, attempting to use drawing to address matters which matter. Here we refer to artists drawing with archaeologists, medics, farmers, pilots, geologists; each imparting aspects of their specialist knowledge and praxis to their artists collaborator. While each ‘other’ may not mark the page itself, each context contributes its particular inflection, which in turn shapes the outcome of the drawing. So within what is now broadly accepted as the expanded field of drawing it is timely and pertinent to look at collaboration in these terms. Using specific examples from our own drawing practice and that of other artists we look at the impact of the collaboration on the drawing, examining the influence of the other realm. What might drawing gain from this mode of collaboration? What are the challenges? And what do we as the drawing community at large, stand to gain from these divergent individual approaches?