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The Australian Artist using the Olympic Gold Medalists to challenge female body image

"Athletes come in vastly different shapes and sizes, as do regular women."

Woman are drawing closer to gaining equal representation at the 2016 Rio Olympics with 45% of competitors being female, the highest percentage in the history of the games.

In 2012 Australian designer Wendy Fox illustrated the 276 Women’s Gold Medalists lined up in a row to highlight the diversity of the female form.

“While watching the London Olympics, I was fascinated by the vast variety in body size and shape amongst the elite female athletes. I was struck by an idea, wouldn’t it be interesting to line them all up?”

This year Fox is continuing the celebration and going one step further by producing a book of the Rio women, funded by a Kickstarter campaign.

“The project is a celebration of the body diversity and the skill and expertise of female athletes, and an illustration that no one body type is more capable or better than another when it comes to competing at the most elite and prestigious levels of athleticism,” reports the SMH.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/womensgoldmedalists/womens-gold-medalists-rio-2016?ref=video

She hopes the project will revolutionise the body image debate and feels that the variety of body types portrayed on such a global scale is something “we should embrace and celebrate.”  

Fox collates her data from the official Olympics website and the illustrated infographic will detail their name, age, height, weight, and sport. Fox said that the first thing she noticed when she started working on the London project was that the fastest woman in the world, Shelly Ann Fraser Pryce is tiny. She is 5’ 0” (152 cm).

“It made me realise how many preconceived ideas I had about what sports were even an option for a short woman (I’m 160 cm), and the exciting discovery that you can be any body type shape or size and find a sport that you can partake in!’

“I think it’s going to be really beautiful, archival and a great resource for girls, young woman, schools, universities, and sport institutes”

The Kickstarter campaign ends on Friday 26th August and you can support and donate to the campaign here.

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