The 'Elephant Man/Cloud' Drawings acknowledge transformations taking place in the world of photography and medical science during Joseph Merrick’s lifetime.  An example would be the groundbreaking examination of a horse running - sequential photography by Edweard Muybridge.

Joseph Merrick participated in freak shows in London and Europe from the 1870s.  A public campaign to raise money for Merrick’s living expenses in the London Hospital was launched in The Times in 1886. Muybridge produced his running horse photographs in 1878.

Merrick was an object of scrutiny and spectacle whether it be to shock and amuse the public or for the purposes of medical examination and investigation.  Whatever the intentions he was, in both cases, treated as a specimen, or phenomenon.

Another Victorian phenomenon was the London fog aka as ‘London Particular’ or ‘Pea Souper’.  Whistler and Monet painted it in a melodramatic sombre beauty.  Writers including Dickens, Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Marie Belloc Lowdnes, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Max Schlesinger described it in all its grim reality. ‘Bleak House’ and ‘Great Expectations’ are key examples.  Its appearance often signals the manifestation of evil and confusion in the forms of Mr Hyde in ‘Jekyll & Hyde’, Jack The Ripper, the mythological ‘Spring Heeled Jack’ and the serial ‘Avenger’ killer in Hitchcock’s ‘The Lodger: A story of the London Fog’ based on Lowdnes’ book.

Fog confuses, conceals and distorts.  Vision is impaired.  Figures, real and imaginary, materialise and de-materialise through it.  Truths are hidden and identities appear to change.  Space and time is disorientated.  Fog is closely associated with the Thames and the identity of London itself through its ever-changing character. It carries both positive and negative values. 

The tension between the (traditional) mysteries of natural phenomena and (new) rational-scientific in Victorian times is highly evident.

The drawings are part of the ‘Fabrications’ series of painting and drawings by Pip Dickens.