Prune Nourry's Venus project, currently on view at Galerie Templon's space at 28 Rue du Grenier-Saint-Lazare in Paris, continues a fifteen-year inquiry into the female body as a vessel of history, trauma and repair. The works grew out of the artist's encounter with Ghada Hatem, a gynaecologist and obstetrician who founded the Maison des Femmes in Saint-Denis, a support centre for women who have survived violence.

Eight women who attended the centre's workshops agreed to sit for Nourry, posing unclothed in defiance of cultural and personal taboos. Working in the intimate setting of one woman sculptor facing one woman model, Nourry drew on each sitter's story and distinct body shape to model busts in the idiom of prehistoric Venus figures. Their words, told during the sittings, shaped the works as much as their physical forms. The portraits were then moulded with the help of the Atelier de moulage du GrandPalaisRmn in Saint-Denis before being cast in terracotta or in bronze under a skin of clay.

The project extends a lineage that includes Terracotta Daughters (2011–2031), Nourry's buried army of clay schoolgirls made with artisans in Xi'an and scheduled for excavation in 2030; Mater Earth (2020–2023); and Statues Also Breathe (2022). Across these bodies of work, clay has served as the artist's central metaphor for women under pressure: malleable, fragile, yet capable of hardening into something that endures.

Nourry, a Paris- and New York-based artist born in 1985 and trained at the École Boulle, has increasingly oriented her practice around collaboration with scientists, sociologists and the women themselves, turning the sculptural portrait into an act of collective testimony rather than solitary observation.