For humans to survive there is a need for protein in the body. While eating foods like eggs, meats or nuts, the proteins that we need are released in the form of protein chains, which are made up of a series of amino acids, kept together by peptide bonds. However, for us to get the nutrients from the proteins, the foods must first be digested, and the peptide bonds must be broken for the amino acids to be small enough to pass though the small intestine and be absorbed into the blood stream. Our body can digest by itself; however that would take a long amount time, therefore our body produces enzymes called chymotrypsin to help break down the protein quicker by breaking the peptide bond. This is an event that occurs naturally in the body, so it is not thought of that much, but if we didn't have these enzymes acting as a catalyst to speed up digestion, our bodies would not be able to absorb all of our needed nutrients and the chemical reaction of digestion would take thousands if not millions of years.

Since digestion isn't something that people can usually visualise, in my artwork I wanted to show how our body works to break down our foods into the nutrients that it needs. Sent from the pancreas, one of the enzymes that we have to help break down proteins is called chymotrypsin, it's understood that chymotrypsin works because the protein chain fits into the active site of the enzyme and then is broken, to show this I used warriors to symbolise how the enzyme is able to break apart the chain. The sign in the painting saying "Pancreas" and "Blood Stream", just shows the enzymes come from the pancreas and once the protein chain is broken into amino acids, the amino acids can then fit in the blood stream. The snakes seen in my artwork represent the protein chain, and the colours on their bodies show what elements the amino acids are made up of, the yellow is hydrogen, the red is oxygen, the pink is carbon, the neon orange is nitrogen and the golden orange is CH3, the order of the amino acids then make up the protein chain. In my artwork the warriors are holding swords with blue around them, representing water, which cut apart the snakes. The blue from the sword is shown on the snakes after they have been cut, this shows how, the peptide bond of the amino acid is broken because it forms this new bond with water, so instead of carbon and nitrogen bonding(to from the protein chain), we see C-OH and H2N as the new bonds.

The big ideas in chemistry that my artwork shows are that matter is made up of atoms, chemical bonding, molecular shape and residual forces between molecules. All these ideas can be seen just in the snakes, we see the first idea which is represented by colour because each color in the snakes are a different element, then coming together to from the whole snake. The chemical bonds are shown because the elements come together and form the molecules of the amino acids; the shape is also shown in the panting because all the colours (representing elements) are place specifically to show the geometry of the amino acids. Also where we see the colour sequence repeating, it is showing the intermolecular forces between the molecules of the amino acids which are then broken by the warriors. Other ideas we can see in this art work are that of barriers to reactions and the fact that entropy tends to increase. The barriers of reactions explain that for a reaction to be completed, a certain amount of energy must be met (Ea). In my artwork we see the snake on the left is not completely cut, the idea I had for that was to show that the warrior responsible was not putting in enough energy to break the snake apart(or break the bond). The idea that disorder tends to increase is implied because the warriors goals are to cut up the snake into a bunch of amino acids so that they can fit through the small intestine and into the blood stream, so the more they cut the more pieces (individual animo acids) they will have and there will therefore be more disorder.