Pamela Council, a graduate student and visual artist, has been working with nails as her medium for several years and credits her inspiration to a trip she took to Vietnam, where she discovered nail art and grew fond of it as a style of art.

Her main project is called Flo Jo World Record Nails and is an Olympic Games-themed nail art project focused on the red, white, blue, and gold nail art that Florence Griffith Joyner (aka Flo Jo) wore when she set the world record in 200 m. track during the 1988 Seoul Olympics. For this project, Pamela hand-painted 300 sets of acrylic nails, totaling out to 3,000 individually painted nails.

Two thousand of these nails were used to create a sculpture in the shape of a 200 m. running track. The sculpture is made of the hand-painted nail tips, is set on a wood base, and is one-one hundredth of the scale size, meaning that each meter is represented by one centimeter.

The rest of the nail tips went to the creation of a line of limited-edition full manicure boxed sets and a gumball machine with individual nail designs. There are 10 different box sets, which will be available on Pamela’s website about Oct. 1.

—Erin