Today, Mullins is a model, an actress, an author, and a speaker. She’s worn legs that look like jellyfish (in reality made of polyurethane, the same material used to make bowling balls), walked down the runway on legs carved by Alexander McQueen out of solid ash, become a cheetah, and walked on “glass” legs (also made out of polyurethane). “I’m that wearer and user of prosthetics that just destroys them,” she told me. “I beat them to the ground. I’ve really never been limited by the limits of the technology. I was doing things you weren’t supposed to do with the legs.” And for many years, since putting on the cheetah legs at the track, and the wooden sculptures at the fashion show, Mullins says she has never felt constrained to the human form. “My legs could be wearable sculpture,” she said in her 2009 TED Talk. “I moved away from the need to replicate human-ness.”

In many ways Mullins was before her time. When she walked on legs of ash or jellyfish, there weren’t many others out there dreaming up imaginative prosthetics. But today artists like Scott Summit and Sophie de Oliveira Barata create incredible pieces of art that also happen to be arms and legs. There are legs made to look like floral porcelain, arms that look like feathered armor, spike legs, arms covered in snakes. The musician Viktoria Modesta, who some have called “the world’s first bionic pop star” wears all kinds of incredibly detailed, beautiful, and edgy legs covered in gears or painted to look like exposed bone. Her music video, “Born Risky,” features the spike leg made by De Oliveira Barata.

In a 2013 interview with The New York Times, De Oliveira Barata described her work on prosthetics as outside of engineering or medicine—the industries with which artificial limb-making are typically associated. “Making an alternative limb is like entering a child’s imagination and playing with their alter ego,” she said. “You’re trying to find the essence of the person.”