One senses the many sources of inspiration in her work and thought. There’s poetry in her titles and associations—“An early inspiration for me,” she says, “was Nauman’s writing—’Flayed Earth / Flayed Self (Skin / Sink).’ I was very influenced by his instructional voice. I think of this active voice when I title my works; they are, for the most part, all still in a state of happening: ‘spreading,’ ‘tearing.’”
She also loves the poetry of Ursula LeGuin and Mary Oliver, “for the way they both honor and make space for the natural world to emerge through their work,” and she listens to folk music-“I’ve always loved The Circle Game by Joni Mitchell; I made a piece titled Circle Game in 2013!”
She thinks of the voids in the center of her works, she explains, “as in Letting the Fire In, as openings or chasms that have a depth that is metaphysical more than it is physical. I think of Lee Bontecou’s voids or Jay DeFeo’s The Rose—these holes or vortexes have an undetermined, or unknown, source or depth. The central void is also usually where I kneel to make the work, so I think of it as the space where my body wears through the clay, the negative space that represents the absence of the body.”
“There’s raw emotion of all kinds—anger, frustration, sorrow, desire, joy,” she says. “I am appreciative of Richard Serra and Robert Smithson and Bruce Nauman—I express my feminism by demonstrating that a woman, or a non cis-man, also has Sisyphean strength, power, and agency in their bodies (I’m reminded of contemporary artists like Cassils and Kate Gilmore, whose work I admire a lot).”
“The interventions,” Ruais explains, in her more asymmetrical construction Spread Out, Torn, Scattershot 130lbs “were actions that could be made upon a body or skin, the cut openings, the peeled and torn back swaths, the finger-pokes that also read like bullet holes. Here, I see the voids and openings as wounds.”
Recently, Ruais has considered print-making, in the sense that she regards imprinting her body—the plate—into the clay as creating a kind of monoprint.
“Her body is her signature,” Klagsbrun says. She tells how Ruais came out to her home on Long Island and brought her own and Klagsbrun’s weight in clay. She dug holes in the center of the mounds laid out on the floor, and then they each performed a piece.
“Nobody else does what she does,” says Klagsbrun. “She lives the way she works, living in the desert. It had so much to do with her body. It’s so personal, linked to time and place.”
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For more information about Brie Ruais please contact the gallery:
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