Translated by Bethszabee Garner

It's like being in Gulliver's world... grandiose, imposing, excessive, sublime, a pregnant woman lying on her back, partially submerged by nature, faces you in the park of Château la Coste. We meet Prune Nourry, one of the rising stars of the international contemporary scene.

Désirée de Lamarzelle : What was particularly complex about it from a technical standpoint?

P.N.: It's the first sculpture I would describe as architectural, even though I had done the giant Buddha at the Guimet Museum. This is a permanent installation for which I needed a permit. My plan to use natural and local materials such as raw earth bricks as much as possible wasn't suitable for all the locations where the sculpture would be on display to the public, so we kept it for the interior and switched to fired bricks and earth concrete, i.e. with as little cement as possible (made from earth, stones, and recycled rubble). I sought advice from architects and specialists in natural earth research, but I have been searching for new eco-friendly materials for sculpture for several years now. That's how we found a lime plaster with a finish made from a mixture of ash. This is even better because it symbolizes fertilizer for a pregnant woman.

Désirée de Lamarzelle : You seem to be a kind of conductor with many scores, which are your works.

P.N.: Each project can be seen a bit like a tree with its roots. To give you an example, with my army in China, I first went there to conduct my research with Chinese sociologists, then I found my team and the girls for the project. These are the roots of my tree: the army, with many projects branching out from it, whether it be a film or my book.

Désirée de Lamarzelle : Clay is very often at the heart of your creations, starting with Terracotta Daughters, your army of 108 young girls in China?

P.N.: Yes, with the help of copyist artisans from Xi'an, I wanted to create my sculptures in the same gray clay and using the same technique as the ancient warriors. We created 108 different combinations based on the eight girls. Each face was personalized and signed by the artisan, as was the case with the real Terracotta Warriors. At that time, someone sent me a reference to the 15th-century Ife heads to show me that there was a real association of ideas between the two. It's quite incredible, but when I saw these heads, I fell completely in love with them. They remained in the back of my mind, later inspiring my project about the little girls who were kidnapped by Boko Haram. I knew I had to go to Nigeria, but with Covid hitting, I waited for the borders to reopen before heading to Lagos, then to Ife, where I found a team on the ground and the university I wanted to collaborate with: the project was born.

Désirée de Lamarzelle : You know Asia well, but has Africa become your new territory of expression?

P.N.: In Yoruba mythology, man was created from clay; this reflects the idea of the breath of life within a sculpture, which speaks to me a lot and is present in the Chinese concept of qi and the Greek concept of pneuma. And it is true that Ife is the sacred city founded by the gods; it is said to be the cradle of humanity, as evidenced by its magnificent sculptures, bronze and terracotta heads whose realism continues to amaze us 1,000 years later.

Désirée de Lamarzelle : What motivates your creativity?

P.N.: For me, being an artist is a chance not to lose what we sometimes forget along the way as we grow up: our feelings, our unconscious, our imagination, our inner child. It's also about trying to erase what we see with our eyes to go beyond, inside, but also outside. In my Phenix project, I invited eight visually impaired people to pose in my studio and I created their busts without ever seeing them (with my eyes blindfolded) – not before, during, or after – using only touch and listening intently. I wanted my hands, which are the sculptor's primary tools, to see for me, because touch is essential in the construction of a human being.

Désirée de Lamarzelle : When I saw your sculpture Mater Earth submerged by nature, I felt like I was touching it with my eyes. 

P.N.: In my opinion, sculpture calls for touch. When Mater Earth is completely finished, my greatest wish is that children will climb on it, that people will be able to touch it, but also enter through the deliberately low door that invites people to touch it. For this, I was directly inspired by temazcals, which are pre-Hispanic places of healing and spiritual experience known as the “womb of Mother Earth,” made of raw earth.

Désirée de Lamarzelle : It feels like being at an archaeological site of a half-exhumed woman.

P.N.: That's an interesting impression, because it resonates with the creation of my contemporary archaeological site for Terracotta Daughters, where I had to dig to bury my army of 108 warriors. Since then, they have been sleeping underground, waiting for the year 2030 when I will return to exhume them. With the passage of time, there will certainly be broken clay sculptures that will need the services of archaeologists to repair them.

Désirée de Lamarzelle : You are described as an artist who questions notions of gender and femininity in our relationship to the body. Would you agree?

P.N.: I don't really like labels, but if I had to choose one word to describe what interests me, it would be the myth of creation, of origins, with its natural materials such as clay and earth. On the notion of identity, I have a project, Genesis, which has remained fairly confidential, around the question of gender: a video that shows Adam creating himself and Eve creating herself from water, so that we no longer know who is the man or the woman. But it remains a project about the material, water, ink, and always the myth of creation.

Désirée de Lamarzelle : Do you ever encounter obstacles in your creative process?

P.N. : I don't think in terms of obstacles. I have this naivety, or rather this crazy optimism, which is shared by my teams, that we can always overcome them. Otherwise, things would never get done, starting with the Terracotta Daughters project that began in China 25 years ago... If I had imagined that it would be so complex, especially financially—I took out loan after loan and had to sell works to pay them back—and that I would decide to travel around the world in the middle of the project, or that it would take me nine months to find the burial site, with breast cancer at the end of it all, I might have given up. Instead, I prefer not to know and to commit myself fully. In fact, I think if I had to do it all over again, I would do exactly the same thing.

Désirée de Lamarzelle : You were talked about a lot in the media when you exhibited at Le Bon Marché.

P.N.: When I saw the line-up of artists (Joana Vasconcelos, Leandro Erlich, etc.) who had been invited before me to take over the space, it really made me want to take up the challenge. In this case, there was a constraint to overcome: the work had to be suspended. That's when the idea of arrows came to me, and I adapted the installation “Amazone érogène” at the Templon Gallery, a set of XXL arrows aimed at a breast-shaped target, which is currently on display again at the Royal Museums in Brussels. It was a project that was still very close to my heart when I wrote my book, Aux Amazones, to accompany my more artistic film Serendipity, about the journey of breast cancer.

Désirée de Lamarzelle : A book about creation as a means of healing?

P.N.: Yes, a more practical and proactive book, too, with advice I would have liked to have had on my own journey. In fact, Hachette and Marabout agreed to publish it at a very low price because my main motivation was to distribute as many copies as possible for free, buying them myself at cost price: I sold the artwork from 108 Arrows to buy them and send them to more than 20,000 women: 22,000 books were distributed to social workers in hospitals and institutes, as well as in departmental libraries.

Désirée de Lamarzelle : You always seem to be in a state of creative effervescence. Do you ever get any rest?

P.N.: For me, rest means disconnecting: no phone, no internet. I'm in a bubble with the people I love. Otherwise, with a good book. In fact, for my installation at Château La Coste, I took excerpts, with her permission, from Nancy Houston's latest novel, which I devoured, Journal de la création.

Article written by Désirée de Lamarzelleto be found in issue n°2 of OniriQ Magazine.