Exploring the intersection of the intelligence of plants through science, business, and creativity to shape the future of innovation.
Creativity is seeing what others see and thinking what no one else ever thought.
Albert Einstein
THE INTELLIGENCE OF THE NATURAL WORLD
Exploring nature through science, research, innovation, art and design.
Kerry Ferguson’s work explores the extraordinary complexity of the natural world — its chemistry, structures, survival strategies, evolution, adaptation, patterns and relationships. She is the Australian founders of Botanical Innovations and Dangerous Beauty.
Some questions are investigated through scientific research and experimentation. Others are explored through observation, materials, art and making.
Connecting these different practices is a curiosity about how the natural world works, how we experience it and what we can learn from it.
Together they form an evolving body of work exploring the intelligence of the natural world.
Through her ventures Botanical Innovations and Dangerous Beauty, she explores the intersection of nature, science, design, and human experience.
Nature is the world’s most sophisticated chemist, designer, and storyteller. My work explores how the intelligence of plants can become both innovation and inspiration.
Through Botanical Innovations, I translate botanical science into industry solutions. Through Dangerous Beauty, I translate nature into art and design.
Her professional work ranges from botanical ingredient innovation and commercial product development through to fine art, biophilic design, and nature-inspired creative work. While the two businesses operate in different industries, they are united by a shared philosophy: that the natural world is both a source of functional innovation and profound beauty.
While the rational mind is important, we gain a new perspective when we learn how many of the greatest scientific insights, discoveries, and revolutionary inventions appeared first to their creators as fantasies, dreams, trances, lightening-flash insights, and other non-ordinary states of consciousness.”
—Willis Harman and Howard Rheingold
BOTANICAL INNOVATIONS
Understanding What Plants Can Do
Plants are extraordinary natural chemists.
Over millions of years they have evolved complex compounds and sophisticated strategies for protection, communication, attraction, reproduction and survival.
Botanical Innovations investigates this chemistry and its potential applications through botanical research, green extraction technologies, analytical characterisation, ingredient standardisation and microencapsulation.
The work brings together science, experimentation and commercial innovation to develop new botanical ingredients and technologies.
DANGEROUS BEAUTY
Seeing the Natural World Differently
Nature is not only something to understand scientifically. It is something we experience.
Dangerous Beauty explores landscape, plants, geology, biodiversity, history, light and natural systems through art, textiles, pattern, materials and biophilic design.
Research and observation are translated through colour, structure, texture and making into collections exploring natural variation, transformation and imperfection.
RESEARCH AND PUBLICATIONS
Science, Art & the Space Between
Research connects these different areas of practice.
Scientific research investigates questions that can be observed, measured and tested.
Artistic research allows the natural world to be examined through perception, material, culture and human experience.
Research and publications are organised around three interconnected fields:
Science — botanical chemistry, bioactive compounds, extraction, standardisation, encapsulation and ingredient technologies.
Art & Design — landscape, biodiversity, botanical forms, history, materials, colour, pattern and creative practice.
Science + Art — exploring what becomes possible when scientific knowledge and creative observation are brought together.
THE INTELLIGENCE OF PLANTS
What Can Plants Teach Us?
Plants have been solving complex problems for hundreds of millions of years.
They manufacture chemical compounds, capture energy, respond to environmental change, manage water, develop extraordinary structures, defend themselves, attract other organisms and participate in intricate ecological relationships.
The Intelligence of Plants is an ongoing research and creative exploration of these capabilities.
It asks a broader question:
What might we discover if we look at plants not simply as resources, but as sophisticated living systems from which we still have much to learn?
Latest
From the Laboratory, Studio & Field
Research, experiments, observations, publications, projects and works in progress from across science, innovation, art and design.
Talk to Us
T: 61 488196527
KerryFerguson@botanicalinnovations.com.au
http://www.botanicalinnovations.com.au
http://www.dangerousbeauty.com.au
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Kerry Ferguson acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we live and work. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging and honour their enduring connection to land, waters, plants and culture that has been cared for over countless genreations.
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