Meeting with Prune Nourry (03.11.2015)

Referring to her previous projects, Breeding Dinners and Holy Daughters, Prune Nourry created the Terracotta Daughters: a group of terracotta sculptures portraying 12 -year-old girls.  In this work, the artist referred directly to the emperor Qin Shi Huang’s Terracotta Army in Xi’an, China, which dates back to the 3rd century B.C. Discovered only in 1974, this extraordinary funeral complex of almost 50 sq.km, houses an army of carved warriors to accompany the emperor on his last journey, who remained buried for more than 2200 years. Nourry borrows and reinterprets a very powerful symbol, in order to raise awareness and draw attention to a serious demographic issue in China:  lack of women due to unnatural intervention in population growth, by a process of selective abortion. In Chinese society the preference of male gender is the result of a patriarchal system that offers a number of advantages, such as the perpetuation of the family line and economic support for the parents in their old age. As a consequence, the only-child policy launched in 1979 worsened this problem even more. Those “missing women,” killed before they were born, are symbolized in Prune’s work by an army of 116 girls.

In 2012 the artist spent a year in a modeling workshop in Lintong, where she collaborated with local craftsmen specializing in copying the soldiers’ statues. At first, she sculpted eight life-sized Terracotta Daughters, modeled after eight Chinese orphan girls. Once these original statutes were completed and molded, Prune gave the craftsmen a table of 108 combinations. Then, based on this document, the artisans used the molds interchangeably to create an army of girls who looked different from one another. Using a traditional historic sculpting technique, Prune Nourry touches the deepest roots of Chinese culture relating to contemporary issues preoccupying us today.