Observation of the world - and the communication of that observation to an audience - has always been central to both art and science. The development of new processes of image making over the last hundred years has offered both disciplines exciting new ways of portraying the world. Artists have exploited photography, film and graphic-design tools while modern imaging techniques have enabled scientists to reveal some of the world's incredible structures at the cellular, even atomic level.

However, the use of images to convey scientific data raises the age-old debate about the relationship between truth and aesthetics. The processes of selection, design and enhancement - inextricably linked to image making - inevitably add a dimension of subjectivity to the reality being revealed. Can this therefore be called objective - or scientific - truth? Conversely, can we really call scientific images 'art', or are the aesthetics or beauty of these images merely accidental by-products of scientific investigation?

These questions are explored in the 'Truth and Beauty' exhibition at the TwoTen Gallery, which focuses on the interaction between scientific evidence and imagery, and aesthetics. The exhibition showcases work by contemporary artists, designers and film-makers, including Heather Barnett, Richard Morris, Anna Dumitriu, Barbara Strasen and Tracey Holland - all of whose work draws inspiration from science. These works are juxtaposed with contemporary scientific research images in the fifth Biomedical Image Awards - a display of outstanding biomedical images acquired recently by the Wellcome Trust's Medical Photographic Library.

The scientific images - such as a tumour attracting and feeding off blood vessels, and a three-dimensional functional magnetic resonance image highlighting activity in the brain set off when we recognise a familiar face - all illustrate the importance of aesthetics in communicating scientific phenomena, in terms of both provoking curiosity and demonstrating biological activity. At the same time, juxtaposed artistic installations draw attention to the essentially mutable nature of 'truth'. Heather Barnett's presentation of a series of glowing footprints created by placing feet in microbiological agar shows that the organisms living on our skin can grow at an alarming rate if nurtured. Tracey Holland's installation - translucent images of dividing cells, spermatozoa, ovary walls and blood corpuscles spanning the length of one wall - offers a vision of the millions of transmutations and processes ceaselessly taking place in a human body.

Such images reflect the symbiotic relationship between truth and beauty, which makes science and art such appropriate, if surprising, bedfellows.

Related links

• Truth and Beauty online exhibition
• Wellcome Trust Medical Photographic Library
• Press release (6 November 2002): Truth and Beauty: Incorporating the Biomedical Image Awards 2002