Chemistry is cool

        Before this trip if you had asked me about the thing I was most excited to see or do… it would have been to eat pasta and gelato. But after that, it would have most definitely been a chance to see la specola. I have been to my fair share of museums and I love to learn new things and La specola is truly a one of a kind place. Typically items within a museum are put on display as is with a slight blurb next to it to explain what you are looking at. The first thing I noticed in la specola, was that there was not a single blurb or explanation next to any of the displays. It is completely up to the viewer to decipher what they were looking at and how had the items in the glass case been organized. The small rooms and thin glass cases created a sense of intimacy, drawing the viewers in to appreciate the beauty of what lay in front of them.

I was first assigned our project, I struggled with what exactly a cabinet of curiosity meant. I began 
this project thinking very linearly. A personal cabinet of curiosity must simply mean a collection of items I found interesting and further wanted to study, so I needed to draw 16 different things which fascinated me. However, everyone kept telling me I needed a connecting theme or idea for my 16 drawings. When I looked at the items I had drawn thus far, I noticed I was attracted to things with the color blue so I proceeded to make this my “theme.” 

            Drawing is not the easiest of crafts for me, and hardly ever do I think what I draw is good enough. Going into the first meeting with you and Abel, I had only drawn about 5 drawings but I was really proud of the way they had turned out. Therefore when you suggested I cut them up and make my drawings “less well behaved”, I had an inner panic attack. Here were these drawings I had spent so long making, and if I cut them up there would be no going back.

            Once I made the first cut and chopped my butterfly in half, my project began forming on its own. I realized that by cutting the butterfly, I was sort of breaking it into smaller pieces and dissecting it apart. This is incredibly similar to what I do as a chemistry major. In my major, we are constantly breaking things down to their basic components so they may be studied more in depth. Taking inspiration from Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook, I decided to make notebook studies on my own. Many chem experiments are designed to study a particle chemical or a particular reaction. In my studies, I chose to focus on the color blue. I was curious about that made birds feathers blue and what causes the specific blue colors within some of the crystals. Making my notebook entries in blue itself turned them into a sort of blueprint, which not only tied back to da Vinci’s notebook, but was a further play on the color blue. Not only did the studies serve a purpose for my project, but I actually learned a lot of things. For example, Aragonite crystals are made from calcium carbonate, but the blue in Aragonite crystals was caused by impurities and is most likely zinc ions.