By Sharanya Gopinathan
It’s so nice to see so much body positive art from female artists and illustrators these days. Last week, we were super excited about Brazilian artist Marcela Sabiá’s disability-inclusive art on Instagram. Now, we just stumbled upon Cécile Dormeau’s work on Tumblr. Dormeau is a graphic designer based out of a suburb in Paris, and does illustrations and gifs that portray women in all their complexity, smashing prevailing normative ideas of “perfection” and “beauty”. Some of them are also a bit cheeky, like an illustration of a woman farting into an eve-teaser’s hand.
One of my favourites is an illustration of a woman who’s undergone a mastectomy.
Another is of flowers growing from stretch marks. The illustrations really just show ordinary women going about their day doing ordinary things, but they’re remarkable because they make you realise just how broad the category of ordinary women is, and how impossibly rare it is to see images like this. We’re so used to airbrushed, Photoshopped images of women held to truly impossible standards of beauty that seeing images outside that category seems different and refreshing. Which is depressing, in a way, but ultimately, it’s projects like this that will go a long way in shifting and changing what we see as beautiful, normal and aspirational. Check out her Tumblr here.