Brie Ruais created this sweeping sculpture from 130 pounds of raw clay, mirroring the artist’s own physical weight. Each mark in "Traveling with the Wind, West, 130lbs" evidences the artist’s bodily connection to a powerful and evolving Earth.
In this series, the artist does what she calls “wind work,” following the guidance of gusts and gales near her Santa Fe, New Mexico, studio as her body scrapes and pushes the clay into shape.
Visitors looking closely at the finished work can see prints of the artist’s fingers, hands and heels. The sculpture also has cracks and breaks in the clay that the artist said represent the Earth’s resistance to her.
Ruais' sculptures are often exhibited with videos that show the creation process, with her body moving in a rhythm with shifting sands under ocean tides, or in a powerful but vulnerable dance with snow, mud or gravel.
The sculpture is about “listening to an invisible force that is always surrounding us, flowing in and out of our bodies: air; wind," the artist said. "Here, the absent subject has left its traces in the clay.”
"Traveling with the Wind, West, 130lbs" is on view in the New Orleans Museum of Art’s second-floor Elise M. Besthoff Charitable Foundation Gallery, along with other new acquisitions in ceramics and glass.
