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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.
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