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The striking landscape of the South Taranaki coast has pulled together a show by six Wanganui artists.

The coastline from Kai Iwi to Hawera hasn't had a lot of vocal admirers. "It's a little remote, rough and wild, and perhaps hasn't been as obvious to tourists," said artist Deb Frederikse.

Coming from the East Coast Bays in Auckland, she took a while to warm to the harsh and windy cliffscape of South Taranaki. Now she can see its charm.

"It's got rock, sky, driftwood, big rivers and estuaries, and beautiful dunescapes with an ecology of birds and plants distinctive to that locality," she said.

North of Wanganui, the soft rocks of the coastline have eroded into cliffs and headlands by the constant pounding of the Tasman Sea. The cliff faces, dunes, estuaries and rocks are captured by the artists in a mix of sculpture, glass work, paintings and drawings.

After three weeks in the two galleries at the Wanganui Community Arts Centre, the show travels to Napier's Statements gallery and next year to the Percy Thomson gallery in Stratford.

The six women knew each other, Frederikse said, and it took them a year to plan and mount the exhibition. It was Felicity Priest who thought it should have a theme to pull it together.

Some of the artists already had work based on the South Taranaki coast.

Sue James is showing rounded and sandblasted glass boulders, and ceramic shapes with thoughts about how boulders are shaped as they tumble from mountains to sea. She said the materials informed her work - "the luminosity and fragility of glass and the earthing quality of clay".

Jenn Dickie's work is abstract and she paints on the floor of her studio with brushes, scrapers and rags and on several large canvases at a time. She's a Quay School of the Arts graduate, lives in Waverley and has exhibited at the Solander and Pataka galleries in Wellington.

Fiona McGowan also graduated with a Whanganui UCOL degree in fine arts, and before that studied ceramics with George Kojis at Wanganui Regional Community Polytechnic.

Her work in this show consists of ceramic pieces made in white porcelain to resemble the holey rocks washed up on the South Taranaki coast - some of the pieces are recognisably rocks and some are rocks crafted into other objects. She said the holey rocks she modelled them on were soft and became pierced by soft-shelled burrowing molluscs.

Frederikse is a graduate of Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland, and has taught drawing and printmaking at the Quay School of the Arts. She takes photographs and makes sketches outdoors, then works on paintings and drawings in her studio.

Living on the Whanganui River estuary meant the shifts of mood in water, wind and sand were never far from her consciousness, she said.

Johanna Pegler also graduated from Elam, and stayed in Wanganui after a stint as artist-in-residence in 2004. She said she made her paintings using oil on board or watercolour on paper and using little bristle brushes, "treating every part of the image as alive and connected".

Priest is a fine arts graduate from the United Kingdom who has recently made Wanganui her home. She has been exhibiting extensively since the 1960s.

Her paintings show the interface of sea and land "where water meets shellrock, black sand and soft mudstone cliff".