Joseph Merrick* The Elephant Man

I made this sculpture before I read the book because I was always fascinated by his grotesque features. Now having read his story it makes me realize how trivial my own personal problems are. We all have problems and to us they are going to be important no matter what, but some things help to really put perspective on it all. The elephant man was hideously deformed, well beyond the sculpture pictured above. For most of his life he was treated as a monster and spent many years locked in a room and displayed in sideshows as a circus freak. It wasn't until three years or so before his death that he finally had a place of his own (a renovated space in the back of a hospital). Despite his terrible deformities and his life of hardships he always displayed a very positive manner; he could not smile, yet he was perceivably happy for the little kindness he had seen.