Terracotta Daughters - 2012-2030

Following on her Holy Daughters project in India initiated in 2010, Prune Nourry found inspiration in the famous buried terracotta army stumbled on in 1974 by farmers in Xi'an, China. In 2012 she drew on this collection of more than 8,000 individual signed sculptures – dating from 210 BC and surrounding the mausoleum of the emperor Qin Shi Huangdi as protection for him in his afterlife – to create a female army made up of 108 unique, life-size Terracotta Daughters. Using the same age-old technique and its different stages of production, she worked with craftsmen specialising in copying the exhumed army with, as models, eight Chinese orphan girls from rural areas, where gender selection is most marked.