Nichola Shanley
The Agnes Dei Collection

Nichola Shanley’s new ceramic artworks appear as the remains of something consumed by fire and reborn as something not of the present but as relics. As a phoenix rising from the ashes, The Agnes Dei Collection materializes as an assembly of blackened figures blessed with a golden lustre. Once the ‘Body of Christ ‘in liturgical texts or uttered at the fraction rite in the Catholic mass, it is now the eucharistic species of bread, broken and added to the golden chalice or vessel. Shanley has presented her figures on long metal trestles as offerings on an altar, a thin ribbon of waxed metal river running towards 2 shroud like silk painting’s, flanked by ancestral heads mounted on the wall. This marriage of myth and Western religion inducing the phenomenon of transformation.