American artist
Brie Ruais is an American artist based in Brooklyn, New York, working in large “multi-faceted” ceramic sculptures, performance, photography, video, and site-specific installation.
Ruais’ work is a process-oriented, performative, body-conscious strain of feminist sculpture and addresses themes such as the environment, eco-feminism, feminist theory, and embodiment. Her work falls in the lineage of body-based conceptual artists Janine Antoni, Bruce Nauman, Lynda Benglis, and Eleanor Antin; artists whose work engages with the land such as Michelle Stuart, Ana Mendieta, and Richard Long; as well as the gestural athleticism of action painting and Richard Serra’s lead performances. Her work has also been compared to artists whose work is influenced by their natural surroundings like Georgia O’Keefe and Agnes Martin.
Early life.
Ruais was born in 1982 in Southern California. She received her BS in Studio Art from New York University Steinhardt School in 2004. She received her MFA from the School of the Arts at Columbia University in 2011, where she studied with Jon Kessler.
Work.
Ruais’s abstract ceramic sculptures retain both the primordial, earthen origins of clay as well as the physical and psychological imprint of their maker. Working on the floor, Ruais begins her work with a predetermined set of actions and an amount of clay that often equals her own bodyweight. The titles of her work reference the gestures she performs, like “spreading out from center,” “compressing,” “pushing landscape,”  and “making space from the inside.” Her process is highly physical and it is performed quickly from beginning to end, utilizing her entire body. She is described as kicking, spreading, scraping, and skimming, cinching, ramming, and shoving the material across the floor or up a wall. The resulting form is then cut into segments, glazed, fired, and hung on the wall. The finished sculpture is embedded with the marks of this process: “whorled and rutted from fingers, elbows and boot treads”.  The sculptures are topographical documents of the performance that formed them.  Ruais’ work explores both the limits of the body and the material.
Ruais is known for her circular wall works that measure on average 80 inches (2 meters) in diameter. The sculptures are made on the floor and then hung vertically on the wall. They resemble clocks, starbursts, ray-like forms, punctures, and wounds. In "Scraped Away from Center, 130lbs (Night)" (2018), for example, the pigmented stoneware extends outward from the center, where Ruais knelt to make it, into a circular form with jagged edges.
Books.
Brie Ruais’ work is included in Phaidon’s Vitamin C: Clay + Ceramic, a global survey of 100 of today's most important clay and ceramic artists, chosen by leading art world professionals, published in 2017.
Collections.
Ruais' work is in the public collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX, Matamoros Art In Embassies Collection, Mexico, Burger Collection, Hong Kong, Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH, and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA.