Early Life
Alison Lapper has a congenital disorder, phocomelia, which caused her to be born without arms and with truncated legs. Her mother met her for the last time during her childhood when she was four months old, although a reconciliation was attempted later in Lapper's life. She was institutionalized from her childhood, and is still distant from her relatives.
When she was fitted with artificial limbs, she experienced them only as an attempt to make her look less disconcerting instead of actually helping her. So she abandoned them and learned to live without external aids.
At the age of 19, Lapper left Chailey Heritage School and moved to London. She acquired a driving licence and a flat. Lapper studied in The Faculty of Arts and Architecture at the University of Brighton and graduated with a first class honours degree in Fine Art in 1994.
Read more about this topic: Alison Lapper
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“It is not too much to say that next after the passion to learn there is no quality so indispensable to the successful prosecution of science as imagination. Find me a people whose early medicine is not mixed up with magic and incantations, and I will find you a people devoid of all scientific ability.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
“Worst, when this sensualism intrudes into the education of young women, and withers the hope and affection of human nature, by teaching that marriage signifies nothing but a housewife’s thrift, and that woman’s life has no other aim.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)