Prune Nourry

Prune Nourry is a passionate, socially engaged artist. Her work explores the body, sex, healing and bioethics. Her sculptures, installations and performances are staged, destroyed and buried – all documented with photography and video. Gender imbalances through sex selection is a major theme. In Holy Daughters (2010) she created hybrid sculptures of cows and girls. Cows are sacred fertile symbols, and she chose girls to challenge the preference of boys in India. After surviving cancer at the age of thirty-one, Nourry created the film Serendipity (2019). It documented her illness and healing, feeding back into universal questions of the human body and survival.

Nourry uses humour to challenge political issues. In 2011, she parked a Spermbar truck in New York City, and asked people to donate sperm symbolically by filling out a donor application form online. Each trait was then linked to an ingredient. Assisted by nurses, passersby could select their preferred qualities from a menu to produce a unique and random flavour. Nourry then dispensed these test tube drinks alongside information like education levels, fitness, religions, and hobbies. She did this to highlight the commodification of new fertility scientific techniques. Conducted in a fun way, Nourry encouraged people to question the ethics of a growing industry. As she puts it “I am an artist who puts on the skin of a sociologist”.