Custom House Studios + Gallery cordially invites you to the official opening reception for The Fresh to the Salt an exhibition of drawings and paintings by artist Angie Shanahan & Bridget Flannery (1959-2024). Please join us on the evening of Thursday 21 August at 6pm. Opening Remarks by Anne Hodge, Curator Prints & Drawings, National Gallery of Ireland.
Exhibition continues until Sunday 14 September 2025.
From Life to Line to Life – Crossing Over in the work of Angie Shanahan
By Cristín Leach
During the rolling pandemic lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, Angie Shanahan and Bridget Flannery, artist friends since their 1980s Crawford Art College days, began what is best described as an immersive collaboration. It was anchored in the complementary practices of river-walking, river-swimming and river-drawing, with Shanahan belayed in Cork by the River Lee and Flannery moored by the River Barrow in Carlow. In 2022, they held a joint show called Watermarks in the Project 12 Studio space on Wandesford Quay in Cork City. It was billed as "a daily mark-making project". There is something about water that connects us profoundly with each other, and with place.
The earliest painting in Shanahan’s half of The Fresh to the Salt, their 2025 two-person show at Custom House Gallery in Westport, was produced in 2017. Ebb and Flow (2017), with its partially submerged steps, glimpse of salt-sodden rope and floating twists of seaweed, is a key image in this new and re-gathered body of work. In 2016, Shanahan found herself looking down and thinking about transitions following the death of her mother. The place where the edge of the water meets the start of the land is a departure point. It’s an invitation to step from gravity-filled air into the buoyancy of liquid, from one form of wisdom towards a different kind of knowledge, maybe even from one version of yourself into another way of being. Bonded by water and drawing and paint, The Fresh to the Salt is an exhibition that Shanahan and Flannery planned together before Bridget's unexpected and untimely death in April 2024.
Shanahan’s work in this exhibition cannot be separated from the time of loss she has encountered and traversed in recent years, with the passing of family members as well as close friends. The painting Ballyquinn (2025) marks the date of Bridget’s first anniversary. It’s the view from “the ledge” at Ballyquinn in Ardmore, County Waterford, where Bridget would sit, before or after swimming with friends, to chat and breathe, and to look at the body of seawater she couldn’t get to during lockdown. If Ebb and Flow is a painting about edges and moving through space and time, it is also an invitation to think about the kind of bodily pleasure experienced by the open-armed woman in the painting Girl Afloat (2023) or the drawing Outstretched and Floating (2024). It’s a reminder that the leap from the land into the water is a release, a form of letting go.
The exhibition Watermarks led to the inclusion of both artists in the National Gallery of Ireland show In Real Life, curated by Anne Hodge in 2024. Among Shanahan’s contributions was the large-scale two-part drawing Heron - River Lines (2022/23), shown again here in Westport.
Shanahan’s drawing practice is remarkable. Her sketchbooks contain records of quick captures of moments and locations. The heron drawing is linked to the south channel of the River Lee, the artist’s walking-route to her then studio near the South Gate Bridge, where eighteenth century stones suddenly collapsed into the river offering a glimpse at the makeup of ancient urban foundations hidden underfoot. It was a reminder that the city is built on a marsh, that you have to cross a body of water to get to the very middle of Cork, that you must take a bridge at some point over the river that splits and regroups around a city-centre island and transitions from fresh to salt.
There is often a dreamlike, hyper- or surreal quality to Shanahan’s painting, but the mark-making in her drawings feels endlessly solid, grounded in physical presence and hand-drawn heft. When she paints, Shanahan sees the oranges in the pinks, the reds in the blue, the greens in the water and the rust at the edges of the shore. She is, like many painters, painting light and how it falls, but when it comes to the works in this show, she is also painting something more. The Fresh to the Salt is an exhibition about love, loss and change, and about moving from one state to another, geographically, physically, emotionally, artistically.
Shanahan speaks of “the water-defined space of the coast”. Her 2024 solo show, The Islands, was a response to the book of short stories of the same name by Irish writer William Wall. The paintings Light in the Western Sky (2024), Into the Island (2024) and Adrift (2024) are included here too. The titles are carefully considered. “It feels as though the world is adrift right now, too,” she notes. Shanahan paints personally significant bodies of water, both inland (Westport Palimpsest, 2024) and coastal (Cadogan Strand, 2023). She paints glass buoys as part of her love of “past historical”, handmade objects and her interest in “old ways”. In Crossing (2025) five cows move together along the riverbank at Shannonbridge in County Offaly, stopping to drink as they pass, as farmed animals have done for centuries here. And yet, these are not nostalgic paintings. They are more fundamentally interested in the links between memory and place, land and water, life and death, and the liminal spaces in-between.
With water comes the idea that the end of one state might simply be part of the start of another. Cara na Mara (2023), a painting of a landmark wreck in in Gweedore, County Donegal, shows the decaying vessel melting into the water and merging with the tidal land, becoming one with it. When Shanahan paints mail or cargo bags on the quay in On the Pier (2024), their white forms could also be read as bundles of winding cloths or burial shrouds; wrapped packages carrying messages from one place to another, waiting for a transition too. Her paintings sometimes feel uncanny, mysterious, edgy, stark. Encounters with death often leave the living with uncomfortable feelings and questions about self and place, about the future, the present, the past. All of this comes through quietly in this work. Shanahan often paints from photographs, images that bestow a fixed, instant stillness on life. And yet, in her hands water appears always in motion, seagulls swoop and wind blows.
These paintings are more than acrylic renditions of what can also be captured by a lens. They are a reminder that there are very few really impermeable lines between things; that starting and end-points might not be as important as crossings over and the journey from place to place; that ongoing conversations are possible between the living and the dead. Ties between Angie and Bridget persist. Maybe the fact that water never really stops moving means it also never really stops connecting us through time and place. This is intimate and curious work. The gesture of painting or drawing or walking or swimming is a body in motion, making meaningful shapes about living. With a sense of deep connection thrown into relief by loss, Shanahan takes us from life to line to life.
Image 1: Angie Shanahan, 'Adrift', Acrylic on Canvas, 71x71cm. Image 2: Bridget Flannery, 'Ardmore', Acrylic on Paper, 14x14cm.
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