In the same way as lines of ink on a page become writing, become a novel, become the reality of a story in the imagination of writers like Robert Harris, and in turn that of the readers, so the lines artist Angela Palmer creates with an engraving tool on sheets of glass transmute in her artworks into other realities.

Life Lines, Oxford artist Angela Palmer’s solo exhibition at Waterhouse & Dodd, 26 Cork Street, London, is a selection of her latest sculptures, which offer inside-out views into the complexity and elegance of the human body and of animals.

The realities of these inner spaces, unseen but by the MRI and CT scanners used to map her subjects, become strange ethereal sculptures that will surely catch the imagination of every viewer.

The works include the head of her friend, the novelist Robert Harris, the head of Eclipse the legendary racehorse who in the 18th century proved impossible to beat and whose bloodlines lead to the thoroughbreds Desert Orchid and Kauto Star, the head of a mysterious Theban Priest who died nearly 3000 years ago (the mummy ‘Djed’ in the Ashmolean’s Egyptian galleries), and the head of a pig, a Landrace Duroc cross, no less, bought in Oxford from a master butcher in Blackbird Leys.

Angela thinks of her work as a unique form of mapping. She builds up each piece plane by plane on multiple sheets of glass, and then assembles them as 3-D images.

As well as delineating a subject, her science-based artworks (and essays in the catalogue) tell the story of the artistic journeys she’s made in creating these extraordinary works.

Her continual quest to marry art and science has led to the field of astronomy. Searching for Goldilocks, made in collaboration with Oxford astrophysicist Dr Chris Lintott, represents a cluster of planets discovered by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope. Around 40 of them are thought to be capable of sustaining life: neither too hot nor too cold, hence ‘Goldilocks’.

In yet another reality, Angela features in Harris’s 2011 novel, The Fear Index. Not as herself but as the artist wife of his anti-hero. Harris appropriated Palmer’s artistic techniques and her Oxford studio to apply them to the story.

Quoted in the exhibition catalogue (from an article in the Financial Times’s Weekend magazine in 2011), Harris said on seeing his portrait, “I had expected not to recognise myself but it’s unmistakably me. It’s like looking at the equivalent of an interior monologue — very apt for a novelist. The more one looks at it the more one sees: it’s impersonal and yet almost embarrassingly intimate.” At Waterhouse & Dodd until June 15.

Angela Palmer’s Ashmolean Mummy Boy is on permanent display in the Ashmolean Museum’s Egyptian galleries.