Wild Style. Brie Ruais works fast, separating a hunk of clay that weighs as much as she does into slashes and craters, decorating it with handprints and smudges. Then, standing in the middle of it all, she spins herself around, drizzling glaze onto the fragile, creviced clay fragments. Her gestures—the forces of her body—are evident in all that she creates, including Circling Inward and Outward, 128 lbs (2020, glazed and pigmented stoneware, rocks, and hardware, 96 x 92 x 3 in.), pictured here. It took about 15 minutes to make. “I’m connecting with the feeling body as opposed to the thinking body,” says Ruais, who lived and worked in New York City for over two decades and is now based in Santa Fe. “I return to the physical body and let it guide my movements.”

Ruais’s work also reflects a preoccupation with the power of the wild, violent forces that formed and continue to shape the earth. After a 2017 residency at the Montello Foundation in rural Nevada, where she lived and worked alone in the remote desert and has since purchased land nearby, she started incorporating raw chemical glazes, powdered copper oxide, soda ash, and an element of chance into her rough surface decoration. The work, Ruais says, represents a small slice of geological time: “We occupy a very tiny moment in this universe and on this planet.” Ruais’s new exhibition, featuring a body of work inspired by the moon, runs May 20 through June 17 at Night Gallery in Los Angeles. —Shivaun Watchorn◆

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