Beginning with 130 pounds of soft clay, Brie Ruais sculpts radial forms that capture her body’s movement and proportions. The amount of material aligns with the artist’s weight, which she heaves from a central point to create the appearance of bursting outward. Each textured wall work freezes an imprint of her body, while glazes in deep charcoal, blue, beige, and rose conjure the elements of earth, water, air, and fire.
Following a recent move from New York to New Mexico, Ruais has experienced high frontal winds, which can reach up to 50 miles per hour at their spring peaks. The artist credits these gusts with “pushing her forward” into a new series, which will go on view next month at albertz benda.
Bone Dice takes its name from “Early December in Croton-on-Hudson” by Nobel Prize-winning poet Louise Glück. Describing a car breakdown on a cold winter day, the poem speaks to human vulnerability in the face of nature’s power but also chance and desire.
Long, sweeping gestures evocative of wind and waves characterize Ruais’s works, and recent pieces like “Gesturing for Her to Follow (130lbs times two)” and “Holding the Space Between Two Waves, High Tide (130lbs Cut from Low Tide)” augment radial shapes with crescent-shaped curves. Glazed in shades from navy to a pastel, sky blue, these forms echo both waxing and waning moon phases.
Ruais is concerned with the relationship between humans and ecology and what embodiment can teach us about equality and justice. Her sculptures inherently fuse disparate elements, connecting earthly, aquatic, and celestial bodies and serving as tangible records of the ways each one informs the others.
