Brie Ruais’ movement-based practice unfolds through the push and pull between her body and clay. Working on the floor, the artist registers the traces of her gestures through the scrapes and gouges embedded in the surfaces of her ceramic works. Each sculpture is made with the equivalent of her body weight in clay, forging a dialogue between the body and the earth. Through her distinctive process, clay emerges as a site of physical encounter. Ruais’ sculptures have a distinctly haptic and sensorial quality, and foreground the nature of one’s experience of being in the body and being in the landscape.

Brie Ruais (b. 1982, Southern California) lives and works in Cerillos, NM. She received her MFA from Columbia University's School of the Arts in 2011. Her work has been exhibited at public institutions including the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA; The Everson, Syracuse, NY; The Anderson Collection, Stanford University, Stanford, CA; Musée d’art de Joliette, Joliette, Québec, Canada; The Southern Utah Museum of Art, Cedar City, UT; the Katzen Center at American University, Washington, DC and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Her first institutional solo exhibition, Brie Ruais: Movement at the Edge of the Land, opened in June 2021 at The Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University in Houston, TX.