The Mori Art Museum will present 'MAM Project 035: Brie Ruais' from 31 October 2026 to 28 March 2027, introducing the Santa Fe-based sculptor's work to a Japanese institutional audience for the first time. The presentation forms part of the museum's long-running MAM Project series, which spotlights mid-career artists with distinctive practices.

Ruais works with clay as a bodily medium. Her signature sculptures are formed through full-body gestures — spreading, tearing, and scraping a mass of clay equal to her own weight — combining the materiality of ceramic with performative action and manual labour. Among the reference works for the exhibition is 'Translating a Flowering Body, 130lb + 130lb' (2026), a stoneware relief whose scale records the physical effort of its making. Her solo exhibitions to date include presentations at Night Gallery in Los Angeles, albertz benda in New York, and the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University in Houston, with group appearances including 'Strange Clay: Ceramics in Contemporary Art' at the Hayward Gallery in London.

For this project, Ruais undertook an artist residency at the Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park in Shiga Prefecture, researching Japanese clay and ceramic history and folding those findings into her own practice. The resulting new works connect her interest in embodied process with the material traditions of one of Japan's historic pottery centres.

An artist talk with Ruais and senior curator Tokuyama Hirokazu is scheduled at the museum on 31 October, the exhibition's opening day. The show opens alongside the museum's Mariko Mori retrospective and the inaugural Mori Art Award exhibition, as the museum returns from a month-long closure.