Brie Ruais’ Wall Sculptures Evoke the Cyclical Nature of Life

Deeply influenced by place, Ruais’ work also dialogues with her environment. Bone Dice showcases pieces she created after moving from Brooklyn to New Mexico. This work expresses her new experiences with the desert landscape, and speaks to redirection, vulnerability, birth, and decay.

Ruais’ process of making is very gestural and all-intensive, and each piece uses 130 lbs of clay– mirroring her body weight. She chooses this level of engagement because she is “interested in what is unearthed within a dialogue between two bodies/beings. What is the third thing or idea that is formed between the two?” 

She adds that “130lbs of clay is a lot! It’s a dense and obstinate mass. We engage in a conversation where we're both asking each other what the other is capable of, then the result is a piece that resembles the act of relating; it's the meandering path of a conversation, a brainstorm, a getting-to-know-each-other. And then that happens between the viewer and the work.”

The title of the exhibition was inspired by Louise Glück’s Early December in Croton-on-Hudson, a starkly beautiful poem in which Glück remembers a tire blowing out on icy gravel during a Christmas present delivery, surrounded by the austere and potentially deadly grandeur of nature, all while longing for someone. 

Ruais was drawn to this “guttural, raw poem,” because it “sensorially pierces the reader (‘spiked sun’, ‘whittled ice’, ‘blown gravel clicking’, a ‘blown tire’),” as she hopes her own work does. Glück’s declaration of ‘I want you’ at the end also makes Ruais wonder “[if] desire is indeed the driving force behind relationality?”

Ruais builds her pieces methodically, using a sort of choreography of movement. Working on the floor or the ground, Ruais uses a highly physical predetermined set of gestural actions to work, shape, and spread the clay– frequently documenting this process through video. 

These shaping actions are often influenced by the natural environment Ruais is interacting with. She then cuts the resulting form into pieces that are glazed, fired, and assembled as a wall sculpture. The finished work retains impressions of finger and elbow marks and boot treads, making it a three-dimensional map of its own process of creation. 

This process also invokes a physical and visual synergy between the artist’s body and the earth, echoing the work of earlier body-based conceptual artists whose work engaged with the land– such as Ana Mendieta.

Ruais uses recurring circular and serpentine visual motifs– evocative of the cyclical nature of life– in her work. She explains, “The circle is what happened to emerge from my foundational movement ‘Spreading outward from Center.’ 

It is a score I follow, which has become a ritual now, that makes a circular form. I didn’t set out to make a circle, I set out to move material from the central location of my body to the outer edges of my reach. I agree, it is evocative of the cyclical nature of life; it is fascinating to me that humans across cultures and time have rendered the circular form in their artwork, pictographs, and ceremonial objects.”

Performance, video, and sculpture all play an important part in Ruais’ installations. She feels the interplay adds important layers to the gallery experience. “I include performance video in my exhibitions,” she says, “because it reveals the side of my practice that is cultivated outside the studio. 

I bring clay to a site like the beach or desert, and I co-create movements in relation to a geography or an elemental force. In the video in this show, ‘Four Phrases,’ my movements with clay are guided by the waves on the shore and the wind in the desert. 

I made a fabric and ceramic wind chime installation that weaves through the galleries and accompanies the sculptures with sound and movement. I made all this work under New Mexico's windy, bright, expansive skies. I wanted to bring that ethereality into the gallery space.”

Bone Dice runs through October 12th. 
For more information, visit https://www.albertzbenda.com/exhibitions/124-brie-ruais-bone-dice/