Brie Ruais (b. 1982, Southern California) lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She received her MFA from Columbia University in New York. Ruais is known for her movement-based ceramic practice, in which each sculpture is formed from 130 pounds of clay — the equivalent of her own body weight. Working directly on the floor, she pushes, scrapes, compresses, and folds the clay through sustained physical engagement, embedding traces of her body into the surface. The resulting human-scale works forge an intimate dialogue between the viewer’s body and the earth, collapsing distinctions between sculpture, performance, and site.
Ruais has exhibited internationally at institutions including Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles; Dallas Museum of Art; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse; Hayward Gallery, London; Kunstraum Potsdam, Berlin; Musée d’art de Joliette, Québec; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among others. She has presented solo exhibitions at Contemporary Craft, Pittsburgh; Albertz Benda, New York; Cooper Cole, Toronto; the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, Houston; Nicole Klagsbrun, New York; and Night Gallery, Los Angeles.
Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Burger Collection, Hong Kong; the Dallas Museum of Art; and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, among others. Ruais is the recipient of awards and residencies including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, the Virginia A. Groot Foundation Grant, and the Montello Foundation Residency. Her work has been featured in Artforum, The New Yorker, and The New York Times.