{"id":29589,"date":"2026-01-19T11:47:11","date_gmt":"2026-01-19T09:47:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.femininemoments.dk\/blog\/?p=29589"},"modified":"2026-01-27T12:04:44","modified_gmt":"2026-01-27T10:04:44","slug":"skuja-braden-artist-statement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.femininemoments.dk\/blog\/skuja-braden-artist-statement\/","title":{"rendered":"Skuja Braden: Artist Statement"},"content":{"rendered":"

Artist Statement and images courtesy of Skuja Braden.<\/em><\/p>\n

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\nImage credits: Gvido Kajons.<\/em><\/p>\n

Skuja Braden: Artist Statement<\/h2>\n

Skuja Braden<\/a> 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 \u201cpretty,\u201d the feminine \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

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\nRoad Trip. Detail from ‘Open Closet’, installation (2023) by Skuja Braden. Photo by Gvido Kajons.<\/em><\/p>\n

We build objects and reliefs that seduce first \u2014 glaze, color, surface pleasure \u2014 then shift into something stranger: satire, tenderness, obsession, danger, devotion. The work is a theatre of women\u2019s lives: desire and shame, care and rage, myth and survival. Archetypes appear \u2014 the saint, the bride, the doll, the goddess \u2014 but they don\u2019t behave. They mutate, resist, and return as real bodies with real stakes.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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\nPortrait of the artists by Krist\u012bne Madjare.<\/em><\/p>\n

About the Artists<\/h2>\n

Skuja Braden<\/a> is the merged artistic identity of Ing\u016bna 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 Working primarily in porcelain, they fuse sculptural craft with painting, satire, and art-historical reference.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 \u2014 ornament, sentiment, beauty \u2014 while turning those languages into tools for sharp contemporary storytelling centered on women\u2019s 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<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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\nImage credits: Gvido Kajons.<\/em><\/p>\n

Related Link<\/h2>\n

Video presentation: Skuja Braden \/ PAiR galerija<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The artist duo Skuja Braden (a.k.a. Ing\u016bna Skuja and Melissa Braden) works with porcelain the way others use confession: as a material that remembers everything.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29591,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1573,1021,1755],"tags":[1756],"class_list":["post-29589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ceramic","category-artists","category-latvia","tag-skuja-braden"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t