View of Brie Ruais's exhibition, 2013. Courtesy Nicole Klagsbrun.
Despite their fragile appearance, Brie Ruais’s ceramic reliefs and sculptures bear traces of the indelicate processes by which they were made. Measures of clay, often corresponding to the artist’s own body weight, have been stomped, kicked, stretched and wedged into corners. The resulting abstract forms are intimately tied to physical action. But when fired with Ruais’s colorful glazes, the work is transformed. Her exploration of process and material—key concerns of so many later 20th-century aesthetic practices—sits in tension with the longer, if often undervalued, tradition of ceramic art.