Hermine Bourdin (b. 1988) is a sculptress who makes abstract works in clay, stone, bronze and digital media, inspired by Palaeolithic and Neolithic periods.Her practice centers on living sculptures brought to life through performance, often drawing on prehistoric Venus figurines and pairing physical sculpture with dance, motion capture and blockchain technology.,,
Born in France, Bourdin lives and works in the Paris region. Her physical sculpture has been exhibited in London, Geneva, Paris, New York, Lisbon, Copenhagen and Berlin. She has also made monumental stone statues for the Bonisson Art Center in France and for the city of Saint Denis. Her digital work has been shown at CADAF's Digital Art Month in Paris, New York, Vatican City and Lisbon, and at Art Basel Miami. In her 2023 solo exhibition “Axis Mundi” at Galerie Julie Caredda in Paris, she performed within the ruins of a 7,000-year-old temple in Malta, embodying a goddess inspired by the prehistoric figurines of the region.Her work draws on the remains of ancient Mediterranean goddess cultures and the writing of the historian Marija Gimbutas.
In 2024, Bourdin undertook a residency with the sculpture and costume departments of the Opéra national de Paris, developing Coddess Variations, a project merging sculpture, dance and blockchain technology.,At the Palais Garnier, the Opéra dancer Eugénie Drion performed choreography by Ania Catherine of the duo Operator, portraying a Palaeolithic goddess who danced as a “living mirror” to a Venus sculpture Bourdin made in the Opéra's workshops.,Footage from the performance, shot at 50 frames per second, provided still images that were marked with Laban dance notation recording the choreography and minted on OpenSea as NFTs. The film director Hervé Martin Delpierre developed the footage into a 21-minute film, Under the Moon, with a score by the Ondes Martenot player Christine Ott. Under the Moon has been shown as an immersive installation at St. Elisabeth Church in Berlin and the Brunel Museum in London.
In 2025, Bourdin showed Universal Venus at “FEMGEN Paris”, a group exhibition pairing contemporary generative artists with historic pioneers from the Le Random collection, including Nancy Burson, Analivia Cordeiro, Copper Giloth and Vera Molnar.For the work, she trained an AI on an archive of prehistoric Venus figurines she had assembled, some more than 20,000 years old, to generate new composite Venus forms that she then carved in stone.,
