IT IS unnerving to come face to face with Graham.
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He looks very much like a living person – but a person unlike anyone seen before, with elongated feet, air sacs on his chest, a flattened face and a head much larger than that of a normal adult.
But gazing upon Graham, a sculpture created for the Transport Accident Commission’s Towards Zero road safety campaign, shouldn’t make the viewer feel comfortable.
He has been designed to provoke discussion about how vulnerable our bodies are on the roads and how easily we can be terribly injured or even killed in collisions involving vehicles.
Road safety researcher Dr David Logan, from Monash University’s Accident Research Centre, advised artist Patricia Piccinini on what happens to the human body when it is subject to the forces exerted in a vehicle crash, as either an occupant or a pedestrian.
The injuries Graham is more resistant to – and conversely, what regular humans are susceptible to – are horrific.
Graham’s hyper-flexible knees have been designed as such because when a pedestrian is hit by a car, they are typically struck at knee-height and break their legs.
He also has a large, double-layered skull and more fluid and ligaments surrounding his brain, which Dr Logan says would protect him from having his brain “slosh around” inside his skull as it could with regular people in road trauma, sometimes breaking neural pathways and causing devastating brain damage.
The air sacs on Graham’s chest act as airbags, absorbing some of the energy a person in a car is subject to in a crash when they are forced against their seatbelt, which typically breaks ribs above a certain speed.
Graham has no neck and his ribs extend up to his skull, protecting him in sudden movement from whiplash and more severe injuries, such as a broken spine and irreversible spinal cord damage.
It would be easy to dismiss Graham as a gimmick, but as TAC road safety manager Samantha Cockfield explains, the issues surrounding humans’ vulnerability on the roads are too complex to distill into 30-second advertisements, and besides, everyone knows they are fragile in these circumstances.
But Graham gives us an explicit lesson in our own fragility, something we cannot afford to ignore at a time when the number of people dying on the roads is rising.