Nichola Shanley completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts at the AIT ASA School of Arts in 1995, majoring in Printmaking.

She moved to Dunedin in the mid 90’s and since that time her practice as an artist and teacher has segued from a printmaking and drawing focus to one of working with clay.  

Her works are domestic in scale and often utilise familiar shapes such as vases, jugs and candle-holders. But far from the familiar, her ceramics appear as ancient, imperfect, almost magical artefacts.

The work acts as a kind of archaeological dig into literature, myths, geology, sorcery and history. She uses clay as an instrument to retrieve submerged memories from past lives, as well as insights into her own intuition and being.

Shanley currently works from her home studio in Lyttelton.

‍