Mothership - Œuvre de Prune Nourry

In 2010, she invited an 8-month-pregnant woman to pose in her studio in an inflatable pool filled with milk, where the liquid created a horizon out of which only certain parts of the body protruded. She photographed the model, made a life-sized mould out of clay, then cast the sculpture in concrete. She soon felt compelled to produce it on a much larger scale, which led to Mater Earth: a permanent clay sculpture created for Château La Coste in 2023.

In keeping with this project, she presents a new work for Le Voyage à Nantes entitled Mothership. Nearly 17 metres (56 ft.) long, the sculpture takes the form of upturned boat hulls, echoing the city’s history as one of France’s oldest ports. Made of metallic structures, the frameworks of these hulls trace skeletal lines that appear simultaneously human, animal, and naval, in keeping with her interest in hybridizing living forms.

As in all of her work, Nourry blends different sources of inspiration in Mater Earth and Mothership: from temazcales (pre-Columbian sweat lodges in Central and North America) to the Lascaux cave paintings, to iconic works from the 1960s by Niki de Saint-Phalle or Jean Dubuffet.