Senia Cade is a Brooklyn-based artist primarily working in ceramics. Originally trained as a painter focusing on portraiture, Cade’s practice shifted to clay in 2024. Moving away from the image and toward objects, she considers her ceramic practice an evolution of the ideas she expressed through painting, thinking through abstraction as a series of gestures resulting in something representational. In ceramics, however, gesture is not descriptive but constitutive. Each mark is recorded by the material, producing forms that function as accumulations of touch, time, and decision-making. Through this process, vessels emerge as objects capable of carrying their own subjectivity.

Conceived as embodiments of individuals in her life or reflections of her own interior states, Cade’s vessels challenge the notion of the container as a passive object. Drawing from Paul S. Briggs’ concept of the “refuted vessel,” her recent forms resist utility, taking on protective, defensive, or even hostile qualities that insist upon their presence rather than their function.

Cade’s ceramic practice also includes the production of functional wares, which she sells under the name familiar objects.

Senia’s work can be found at:

Knickerbocker New York, located at 357 Canal Street, New York, NY 10013

USM Modular Furniture Showroom, located at 28-30 Greene Street, New York, NY, 10013