In 2010, the French artist Prune Nourry photographed a friend who was eight months pregnant lying in a bath of warm milk, à la Cleopatra. She used a camping stove, an inflatable pool, and a ladder to set up the shot in the middle of her studio. Four years ago, Château La Coste, a wine estate that covers 500 acres near Aix-en-Provence, approached Nourry to create a permanent installation for its outdoor-architecture trail. That pregnant woman in a pool—seven rounded forms emerging from milk—immediately came to mind. For this assignment, she would bring the bathing body into a whole new dimension and scale. Now it is 90 feet long, reclines in the earth, and one can enter it.
Château La Coste is a “playground of expression” for artists such as Nourry. “They gave me carte blanche,” she says. “It was too beautiful to be true.” For the new work, titled Mater Earth, Nourry chose the location specifically so that the sculpture could be seen from several points of view, including the top of a nearby hill, to embrace the whole work at once. “I wanted the sculpture to look like it has always been there,” she said.
