Prune Nourry

Biography

Since she obtained a diploma in woodcarving at the “Boulle” school in Paris in 2006, Prune Nourry, now based in New York, kept seducing the world of contemporary art with projects as ambitious as unpredictable. The young French artist has developed a reflection on bioethic, genetic manipulations and selection of the sexes through mediums such as sculpture, installations, performances, photography and videos. In order to create an artistic approach that is both esthetic and anthropological, Prune Nourry has gathered up solid scientific documentation such as readings, seminars and interviews of researchers. She explains: “by the means of art, imagination and thus of emotion, I seek to give rise to a reflection capable of bringing about a change of mentalities”.

Prune Nourry first established herself as an artist in 2007 with her Domestic Babies which she confronted with passers-by of the Parisian streets. These half dog half baby hybrid sculptures made of silicone or resin and attached to a leash shocked and amused by their monstrosity and their disarming realism. The Domestic Babies denounce in an ironic way the fetichisation of children and the humanization of pets. In addition, they can also be considered as a possible result of the drifts related to the practice of genetic selection carried out on the embryo in the search to create a custom-tailored child. This topic has also been the subject of several performances such as The Procreative Dinner in 2009, Sperm Bar in 2011 or Holy Daughters in 2010.

The project Holy Daughters reiterates Prune Nourry’s hybrid experiments by the creation of half woman half cow bronze sculptures. Displayed in the streets of New Delhi, these works refer directly to the ambiguity which exists in India in relation to the worship of the cow, symbol of fertility, and the rejection of the woman in a patriarchal society where the selection of male fetus is common practice.

It was in China that the artist’s reflection on genetic manipulations was pushed to the extreme with the colossal project of Terracota Daughters. As a starting point, Prune Nourry took the terracotta army found buried in Xi'an in the 1970s. In 2012, she started collaborating with Chinese craftsmen specialized in the copy of these sculptures to create 116 human scale terracotta soldiers by using the ancestral techniques. To do so, the artist took 8 young Chinese orphan girls as models and then multiplied the original statues by the process of molding. This army of young girls was set up in memory of the thousands of rejected girls and the ones that were killed before birth because of the one-child policy in China which privileges the male sex. In 2015, Prune Nourry’s army will be buried in turn for a period of 15 years.

Prune Nourry revisits the traditional techniques of sculpture and contributes to its renewal.