This Looks Like A Petri Dish Full Of Microorganisms, But It’s So Much Cooler

People often categorize others by describing them as being “left-brained” or “right-brained.” People who are more logical, strategic, and rational are placed in the former category, and those who are more creative, intuitive, and artistic are placed in the latter.

While it’s obvious that most people embody different combinations of the two, it’s fair to say that plenty of us fall further to one side than the other. One creator who appears to fall somewhere in the middle is Anglo-Irish artist Rogan Brown. His creations are aesthetically stunning, and they’re inspired by the building blocks of scientific study.

His latest collection is called Magic Circle Variations, and it’s designed to straddle the fence between what’s real and what’s imagined.

In the artist’s words, “Reality is transformed and estranged through the creative process, which paradoxically makes the finished work more real and unique.”

He makes hundreds of these intricate paper cuttings for every single piece.

Some of Brown’s earlier work was exclusively hand cut, but this collection combines hand-cut designs with others that were created with lasers.

When coming up with the concept and direction of each piece, he studied the imagery of bacteria, coral, pathogens, and diatoms. Beyond that, the compositions are fictive, imagined, and totally original.

(via My Modern Met)

Although he cites model-making and scientific drawing as inspirations for this collection, “everything has to be refracted through the prism of the imagination.” It’s not often that an artist is able to steer vastly different worlds into such an incredible collision.

To see more of Rogan Brown’s work, be sure to check out his online portfolio and follow him on Facebook.