MAM Project 035: Brie Ruais

MAM Project 035 presents Brie Ruais, an artist based in Santa Fe, NM, USA. Ruais creates sculptures that incorporate performative elements, focusing on the materiality of ceramic, physicality of the artist herself, as well as the nature of hands-on labor. Among her signature works is a series shaped through full-body movements ‐ spreading, tearing, and scraping a mass of clay equal to her own body weight. Bearing the direct traces of her body, these works reflect an individual existence and lived experience, while their powerful movements and emotional expression embody a unique artistic practice that fuses bodily action with the inherent qualities of clay.

For this exhibition, Ruais, following an artist-in-residence at the Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park in Shiga Prefecture, has conducted research into Japanese clay and ceramic history, integrating her findings with her own practice to present new works. Born from an intimate dialogue between clay and the human body, these works invite us to reconsider the relationships among our bodies, the earth, and the nature of individual existence.

Brie Ruais

Born 1982 in Southern California, lives in Santa Fe, NM. Ruais received her BFA from New York University and MFA from Columbia University. Her solo exhibitions include Daughter, You Seem Foreign to Me at Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2023); Some Things I Know About Being in a Body at albertz benda, New York (2021); and her first institutional solo exhibition, Movement at the Edge of the Land at the Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University, Houston (2021). Her group exhibitions include Strange Clay: Ceramics in Contemporary Art at Hayward Gallery, London (2022); Taking Space: Contemporary Women Artists and the Politics of Scale at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia (2021); and Crafted: Objects in Flux at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2015).