Working from her home and studio in Ōhinehou Lyttelton, Nichola Shanley makes work that returns rarefied glass-cased objects to the living spaces of people’s homes. Shanley’s cross-disciplinary work is often domestic in scale and material – vases, lamps, silks, ceramics – becoming household vessels for the lore of her practice.

Shanley re-forms figurative, grotesque imagery and distinctive, textural mark-making to create works that she thinks of as antidotes to the “spiritually bereft and clinical practices of living in the modern world.”¹

The Agnes Dei Collection calls on Shanley’s inner world and her attraction to the rub of contradiction: the sacred and the profane, pagan and Catholic motifs and memories, the simplicity of a white porcelain body and the obscurity of densely layered black stain. She excavates literature, myth, magic and her own mind, combining her findings into a luxurious visual language that is as much about ‘making’ as ‘meaning.’

The collection of vases and lamps here speak particularly to the prehistoric material of clay and its transformation in Shanley’s hands. Moulded, heated and coated through the rituals of her studio practice, she describes the material as an agent in her making; “form is inside the rock, inside the clay, and it’s in charge.”² Lustrous gold elicits the ornamentation of religious artefacts and palaces, but also this transformation – the alchemy needed to take something from raw to precious.

The Agnes Dei Collection celebrates nearly three-decades of refinement of Nichola Shanley’s craft and her unique contribution to creative practice in Aotearoa.

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Nichola Shanley was born in Waimana and received a Bachelor of Visual Art from the Auckland Society of Art in 1995. Her work has been exhibited nationally since, with recent exhibitions including The Agnes Dei Collection at Two Rooms (2024) and Living Room at Objectspace in Ōtautahi (2023). Shanley is represented by Brett McDowell Gallery, Ōtepoti Dunedin.

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Nichola Shanley: The Agnes Dei Collection was first exhibited at Two Rooms, 19 July – 17 August 2024, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.

¹ Nichola Shanley, Artist Statement, SPA_CA, https://thisisspace.co.nz/artists/nichola-shanley, accessed 21.02.24
² Nichola Shanley quoted in Gwynneth Porter, I am ash, published by Two Rooms, June 2024