Skuja Braden: Artist Statement
Artist Statement and images courtesy of Skuja Braden.
Image credits: Gvido Kajons.
Skuja Braden: Artist Statement
Skuja Braden is a collective practice rooted in porcelain, domestic space, and lived lesbian experience. We work together as a single author. Skuja Braden works with porcelain the way others use confession: as a material that remembers everything. It carries the weight of the decorative, the domestic, the “pretty,” the feminine — categories that art history has too often treated as lesser. We take those categories and turn them inside out. In our work, ornament is not softness. It is pressure. It is endurance. It is camouflage.
Road Trip. Detail from ‘Open Closet’, installation (2023) by Skuja Braden. Photo by Gvido Kajons.
We build objects and reliefs that seduce first — glaze, color, surface pleasure — then shift into something stranger: satire, tenderness, obsession, danger, devotion. The work is a theatre of women’s lives: desire and shame, care and rage, myth and survival. Archetypes appear — the saint, the bride, the doll, the goddess — but they don’t behave. They mutate, resist, and return as real bodies with real stakes.
We believe craft can carry truth. Not polite truth. The kind that makes you laugh and wince at the same time. The kind that sticks.
Portrait of the artists by Kristīne Madjare.
About the Artists
Skuja Braden is the merged artistic identity of Ingūna Skuja (Latvia) and Melissa Braden (California), active since 1999. Working primarily in porcelain, they fuse sculptural craft with painting, satire, and art-historical reference. Their works draw on the aesthetics of the decorative — ornament, sentiment, beauty — while turning those languages into tools for sharp contemporary storytelling centered on women’s lives, desire, agency, and cultural pressure. The result is intimate, theatrical, and often darkly humorous: objects that seduce the viewer, then refuse comfort. In 2022, Skuja Braden represented Latvia at the 59th Venice Biennale with Selling Water by the River.
Image credits: Gvido Kajons.
Related Link
Video presentation: Skuja Braden / PAiR galerija