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Liz Rowland: The Cockle Women of South Wales

Liz Rowland: The Cockle Women of South Wales

May 24, 2025
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There’s a briskness to the air along the South Wales coast - sharp with salt, alive with stories carried in on the wind. At low tide, you can imagine the quiet clatter of baskets and the steady presence of women bent to their work, gathering cockles from the sand. It’s within this windswept, rhythmic landscape that artist Liz Rowland found inspiration for her latest series.

Cockle Woman No. 2, Liz Rowland, 2025.

Her newest paintings, The Cockle Women of South Wales, created for The Shop Floor Project, is a tribute to a traditional way of life and the quiet power and permanence of the women who lived it. Part of a broader collection entitled Rural Life, these paintings anchor the viewer in a place among sand, seaweed, and rusted buckets. You can almost hear the soft bray of donkeys, feel the cold bite of wind under a scarf, and smell the brine of the low tide.

Rowland, a graduate of Falmouth School of Art, is no stranger to detail. Each Cockle Woman stands tall and statuesque, painted with bold brushwork that echoes the strength of their stance. They are rendered in solid shapes and fluid faces that recall unapologetic honesty. The features are naïve, almost childlike, yet dignified - each expression telling of endurance and history.

Cockle Woman No. 5, Liz Rowland, 2025.

The palette is earthy and evocative: copper, rust, coal black. These are the colours of utility and tradition - of naturally dyed fabrics and weather-beaten tools, coarse buttoned shirts, wispy head scarves and striped ticking trousers. In their heavy flannel gowns and headscarves, the women are not romanticised, but respected. “I loved spending time studying these amazing women,” Rowland says, reflecting on a commission to illustrate a book about seaweed that first introduced her to the cockle women’s legacy. “Their layers of heavy clothes and weather-worn faces… I wanted to explore these drawings further for this collection.”

Cockle Woman No.4, Liz Rowland, 2025.

And explore she has. The resulting works feel timeless, as if the women themselves have become part of the coastal rockscape - immovable, essential. Through Rowland’s eyes, these gatherers of the sea become more than figures in a painting; they are emblems of rural resilience, carved in paint and wind.

As waves crash against the shore and gulls cry overhead, the Cockle Women remain - solid, unsentimental, and full of grace. In Liz Rowland’s hands, history doesn’t fade. It stands firm, boots deep in sand, eyes on the horizon.

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Further Information:

Liz Rowland

Website

@lizrowland

The Shop Floor Project

Website

@theshopfloor

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Image Credits:

Lead Image: Cockle Woman No.1, Liz Rowland, 2025.

All other images as credited in image captions.

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