Editor’s thoughts
With a profound collaboration between body and matter, Brie Ruais brings clay to life through a close and corporeal relationship with clay. Each sculpture, molded from 130 pounds of clay that symbolizes the artist’s own body weight, takes shape as Ruais’s movements unfold, spreading, pushing, and scraping the material in gestures rooted in the practice of Spreading Outward from Center. This practice captures the essence of our interconnectedness with the world, reminding us that our bodies serve as the epicenter of our experiences.
In Some Things I Know About Being in a Body, artist Brie Ruais unveils an extraordinary exploration of the human experience through the transformative medium of clay.
With a profound collaboration between body and matter, Brie Ruais brings clay to life through a close and corporeal relationship with clay. Each sculpture, birthed from 130 pounds of clay—symbolizing the artist’s own body weight —takes shape as Ruais’s movements unfold: spreading, pushing, and scraping the material. These gestures are deeply rooted in a foundational practice called Spreading Outward from Center, capturing the essence of our interconnectedness with the world, and reminding us that our bodies serve as the epicenter of our experiences.
As if extracting secrets from the depths of the Earth, Ruais embarked on a transformative journey in August 2021, venturing to a clay quarry in New Mexico. With her bare hands, she harvested wild clay, delicately peeling away its drying skin from the muddy basin and crumbling clay from the cliff face. Laden with hundreds of pounds of clay, she immersed herself in the clay pond, creating performative gestures that paid homage to the profound connection with the place.
The sculptures that emerged from this transformative experience, forming part of the Some Things I Know About Being in a Body series, were exhibited at the albertz benda gallery in New York from December 9, 2021, to January 22, 2022.
The beginning
Brie Ruais: I made ceramics as a teen at an art community center, then picked it back up in Graduate school when I was 27. I started working with clay for its long-running role as a mediator between people and the earth – most often taking the form of a vessel. The pot/vessel is something that LIVES with people and is active in the sense of it still being connected to the earth and also connected to people. Then I fell in love with clay’s ability to hold legible the touch and story of the making of a form.
Material, Process & Connection with the Material
Brie Ruais: Through my early endurance-based work using large quantities of clay, I learned that clay is a material that yields as much as it asserts; this opened up the possibility for me to let go of the idea of controlling the outcome. That openness allowed for many things to come through: ritual, embodiedness, connection to the place I’m making, and emotional expression. The performative score that I keep returning to over again is Spreading out from the Center (2011). I always begin from a centralized position, on a mound of clay on the floor, and spread the clay outward while I rotate in a circle.
Impactful Presence & Nature
Brie Ruais: The work is typically made out of the equivalent of my body weight in clay: 130 lbs, and that volume of clay spread out tends to be human scale: the size of the finished piece is approximately a person’s wing span and height. This allows a viewer to have a physical experience as their body relates to the sculpture.
The non-human world is constantly amazing me and inspiring my palette and textures, and providing me with a sense of place in the order of the universe. The places where the human industry has disrupted the natural flows in ecosystems continue to be a source of information as I study the scars, impressions, and movements recorded in the land.
Interview with Brie Ruais by Rita Trindade | Video/Images courtesy of the artist and albertz benda Gallery, New York.