LucienneRoberts+

This exhibition asks not what brains do to us, but what we have done to brains in the name of medical intervention, scientific enquiry, cultural meaning and technological change.

Taking slicing, cutting, collecting and classifying as our starting point, we developed a graphic system informed by both brain preserving and brain labelling and categorising. Our initial research took us to the Royal College of Surgeons in London, where the head of the conservation unit explained how real specimens are preserved. Next stop Capital Models who helped us ‘preserve’ the exhibition title. Each letter is made of ‘slices’ of perspex, contained in a bespoke acrylic box filled with a solution of glycerin and water. The refractive index matches that of real specimens so that each sliced letter appears in multiples when viewed at different angles, while the colour palette references both ‘grey matter’ and the energetic activity of the brain.

The design of the exhibition texts alludes to diagrams and labels, incorporating leader lines and a variety of keyline boxes to code each of the exhibition sections. The font, Bureau Grot, clearly draws on the design of nineteenth-century grotesques and was initially developed by David Berlow in 1989 from original Stephenson Blake specimens. Having looked at the historical material that was going to be exhibited, we decided that its quirks and irregularities suited the breadth of the show's content perfectly. Seen in plan the 3-d design clearly references slices. To reinforce this and the overall exhibition theme of categorising, each of the angled end walls carries an inventory listing all the material on display.

• Exhibition design
• Calum Storrie

• Graphic design
• Lucienne Roberts/John McGill
• LucienneRoberts+

• Photographs
• copyright
• Richard Hubert Smith
• Ben Gilbert, Wellcome Images