130 pounds of clay form the basis for each of Brie Ruais‘s sculptures, echoing her own physical weight and the visceral movements of her body. Working with earth through a gestural process, the material fans out into radiating, organic geometries.
Ruais recently moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, from New York, where she continues to engage with materiality, feminism, and embodiment, markedly with a view beyond an anthropocentric view of the world. Her move to the desert of the American Southwest spurred even further interest in lunar phases, wildfires, the wind and weather, and the landscape more broadly. Mirroring orbital cycles of the sun and moon or the changes in the seasons, she builds up reflections of human emotional and bodily cycles—birth, life, death, decay, and rebirth.
Ruais conceives of her and our role in nature as inextricably linked to everything around us, drawing on dualities and parallels like presence and absence, darkness and light, dormancy and vitality. A solo show of Ruais’s work, Bone Dice, opens September 5 at Albertz Benda in New York.
