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, this marriage of myth and Western religion inducing the phenomenon of transformation.

In objects there is information, all made objects being techne, technical, forms of technology. There is information registered in ceramics, which is compounded by fact that are materially inert. They remain, prevail over decay, with the of patience of stones and the undead. The vampires of the art world in an eternal present.

Except from the accompanying essay, I am ash by Gwynneth Porter