Bree ScottiB
rie Ruais creates in the middle of her inspiration. Advancing away from her studio Ruais’s creations are left to dry and live in the dessert from where their initial consciousness stemmed from. Due to
her intuitive way of creating Ruais admitted to not have a creative flow March through June. Due to quarantine she was disconnected from the inspirational scenes of the Earth.
Her practice has advanced from manipulating 130 pounds of clay to include the use of drone photography to capture motivational images of the landscape which push her to create. Five foot pieces are dwarfed by the vastness of the landscape that surrounds her. The clay, when left in the Nevada desert, it is based on and left in that landscape the clay dries naturally the clay cracks like mud in the desert.
Desiccation is the removal of moisture from something, in this sense moisture from the clay, but Ruais uses this word to describe the human relationship to the Earth. The five foot creations show our relationship to the landscape and to our overuse of the Earth’s vast resources. Her creations are her weight as well as her height due to her process of the center moving out. Ruais discovered this technique as well as the ability to strengthen her voice through Graduate School at Columbia.
The use of drone photos contextualizes each piece in the surrounding environment. As the Earthly environments differ Ruais does not like consistency. The various bursting, spiraling forms all speak to similar ideals. The clay forms evolve overtime alongside each other. Her photographs are used as a boarder to her works to provide details to her website.
"Websites are so hard for artists, but so essential.”
Art is nonverbal making it hard to reveal the relationships between the art and everyday life. Ruais describes her work like the terrain in which it stems from. To experience the pieces n the virtual realm Ruais communicates her work to appear like mapped images of places, of movement, of experiences by turning the horizontal experience into the vertical. Ruais is playing with gravity and endurance to capture the life of an ephemeral piece.
In postindustrial civilization humans take and never think of a reciprocal relationship with our Earth. We are animals that survive on the earth’s resources, but how can we give back? Ruais calls into question our roll with the relationship, with reciprocity to give back, by exploring through the material, and the environment to provided her a place to dive deep into what matters to her.
The narrative established by creating art in the middle of the dessert does not belong to her, yet carries the information of the location. By allowing play to happen and inserting meaning where we can will an understanding be welcomed. Ruais admits she found her voice through age and by letting go of doubt.
“when creating do not have doubt and questioning, evaluation comes after you make the thing, just peruse your interests”
