Alchemy is often known as the Chemistry of ancient times that contributed to the development of modern science. Back in the days, many myths and stories were told where alchemists were capable of transmuting, on a transmutation circle, common metals like lead into fancy ones such as gold. Was this magic or simply science? Alchemy was also based on many concepts and beliefs that mostly contradict the ones from today’s science. One of the most popular concepts was the fact that the World was made out of 4 basic elements: fire, water, air and earth. Even though Alchemy was doomed to fail because of a misunderstanding of the basics of chemistry and physics, it is quite interesting to explore its field. Tracking the evolutions that it went through, we can slowly understand how it transitioned into Chemistry with time. Going from simple elements to atoms, to molecules and into mental models, the evolution can be explained on a Transmutation Circle. With this being said, my artwork consists of this Transmutation Circle.

I chose to attempt to demonstrate the transition from Alchemy to Chemistry because I find it important to realize how human beings used art to evolve in a domain and also, to enlarge our field of vision. There were many symbolic representations in Alchemy and one can have many perspectives of them. In other words, there are many ways to interpret these symbols. For my art project, I chose to present my way of seeing this circle and also my way of implanting Atkins’s big ideas of chemistry in this science transition.

To begin, as we can see, my artwork is the famous Transmutation Circle in which I used the inside to represent the beliefs of the Alchemists: the four elements of nature. With a human standing in the middle of the circle, or on earth, we can see that he is definitively the center of attention. It is by enlarging our field of vision that we see the transition: if we enlarge our vision of the circle, we see that these elements all contributed in today’s science. Fire contributed in the combustion reaction. Water contributed in the research of molecules of H₂O and also the intermolecular forces such as H bonds. Air contributed in the research of gases. Earth contributed to the metals that we all know today. However, this is only one of the factors that affected the transition. If we enlarge our vision of the circle once again, that is where Atkins’s big ideas of Chemistry come in play. I represented some of the big ideas with cardboards around the circle. The reason why I put them around the circle is because I wanted them to be walls that prevented Alchemy from evolving. As mentioned before, Alchemy was doomed to fail because of a misunderstanding of science’s basics.

I represented Periodicity with one of the Periodic trends with descending mountains. As we can see, from left to right and from bottom to top, the size of the mountains decreases and this represents the atomic radii. I used elastics to show the molecular shapes and the chemical bonds such as sigma bonds because elastics are used to attach objects together: when electrons pair, they form bonds. I also chose to represent that matter is made of atoms by showing the different atomic models: Dalton’s model, Thomson’s model, Rutherford’s model and Bohr’s model. In brief, these are concepts that Alchemists should have understood back in the days in order to keep advancing. Unfortunately, it was not the case.

For the person in the middle, there are two ways of interpreting it. Firstly, we can see it as an alchemist that failed his mission to transmute which brings us back to Alchemy’s failure. Secondly, we can see it as one of Chemistry’s biggest challenges: there are too many mental models. The person in the middle is trying to study all of them, but he is struggling. If we look closely, he is kneeling and we see a negative dipole on him because he is dipole-dipole attracting all the knowledge to him, but there are just too many them...

Art plays an important role in every domain. You need creativity to come up with something and everyone can have different perspectives. However, it can also result into too many mental models. Art unlocks the door to infinity.