There is a provocative question posed within the wall text introducing artist Ash Eliza Willams’ work, now on display at the Denver Botanic Gardens: “What would a rock say if it could talk?”

Williams spends long hours pondering questions like that. And some others: How do fish communicate within schools? How do birds read each other’s minds and avoid crashes on long, migratory journeys? How do trees discuss the weather?

These are scientific questions, and the artist has worked closely with zoologists, marine biologists and astronomers doing research.

But Williams also takes an artist’s license to concoct the fantastical answers that are reflected in the paintings, sculptures and installations in this show.

Willams’ works do explain natural phenomena, but they go beyond fact and into a dream-like place that suggests a larger web of dialogue exists among natural objects, and between non-human objects and humans. Can a snake chat with a flower? Can a seed pod correspond with a volcano? How do boulders express their autobiographies to geologists?

The DBG show, “Language Without Words,” pulls together several bodies of work that Willams has made recently, and they take various forms.

Some feel like interactive exhibits in a science museum, aiming to teach children about the planet.

“Alphabet of Stones,” for example, is a set of black, ceramic rocks set up in a row on top of a white table.

Visitors are instructed to pick up a rock and see what is underneath. The tiny, hidden objects that are revealed give clues about historic periods of biodiversity and mass extinction.

It’s a bit of school, but it is fun to play along.

Other objects in the exhibit take the form of more traditional paintings hung on the wall. For works like “Bird Language (Murmuration),” Williams presents a series of images in oil of both the sky and flocks of birds flying through it. The artist organizes the painted images into grids that create a sort of code that explores how the migratory birds take their formations over large bodies of water and through stormy skies.

A similarly organized work, “Dreams of an Orange Fruit Dove,” is a grid of animal-like things such as snakes, beetles and human eyes integrated with geological features like mountains and plants.

The works are mysterious, surreal in a way, and they invite viewers — indirectly — to contemplate connections between the inhabitants of the planet and beyond.

In that way, the works cross a daring line. As a culture, we tend to keep scientific facts separate from the fantasies of artists — it is how we know the real from the unreal, and how we order the universe.

But Williams’ work suggests that you need both the scientific data and a bit of imagination to fully grasp how the natural world operates — or at least use that to open yourself up the the possibilities.

It is a hybrid practice that has earned Williams exhibitions at straightforward art sites, like Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art and K Contemporary gallery (which represents Williams) and more matter-of-fact institutions, such as the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder and the New York Hall of Science in Queens.

The most prominent works in the DBG show also cut across the usual categories of visual arts. There are both traditional sculptures and paintings on display, but also a series of works that combine the two forms into something that is hard to name.

Works such as “Cloud Shadow and Cloud Specimen,” for example, are made up of both colorful paintings hung on the walls and 3-dimensional clay pieces that sit on shelves directly in front of them. In this case, that means a two-dimensional painting of blueish blob of nebula rendered in oil and gauche in the background, and a clay, cloud-shaped sculpture on the shelf before it. The piece, in its way, connects the psychic dots between actual clouds and the whimsical ideas we have about their shapes and movements.

The connections get more abstract than that. Consider: “Leaf and Blushing Tree,” “Blue Rock and Small Planet,” “Cactus and Mushrooms” or “Lightning and Cloud.”

There are dozens of these works that mix diverse elements of a painting and a sculpture into one cohesive and indivisible work of art.

They can be very science-minded. One work sets a painting of a school of fish behind a ceramic piece shaped into a reef. The pieces explain how fish have sensory powers that allow them to move gracefully in large groups.

Or they can be very science-fiction-like. “Squid and Moon,” for example, which has a yellow-green painting of a squid, set before a small, ceramic moon, looks like something off of a low-budget, space-epic movie set.

Other objects have spines, spindles, thorns, tails and teeth.

They are based in nature, but they have personalties that range from comical to creepy.

In that way, it is a very entertaining show, and for a wide audience. Williams has real skills, especially with a paintbrush, demonstrating precision but also a light and imaginative touch.

But the artist also has a sense of humor and wonder, a curiosity that is appealing and informative, but not overly instructive.

Mostly, the show is a journey into the mind of a nontraditional scientist who just wants us to think about the things we can understand about the natural world and what might yet is to be understood.

Ray Mark Rinaldi is a Denver-based freelance writer specializing in fine arts.