The Dawn of Venus (1992)

Thomas Lowinsky

According to the ancient legend the Roman goddess Venus was born
from the sea foam. She is associated with love and so on. According
to the legend she used a shell to be able to travel across the seas,
that probably why so many paintings of her have shells on it. The
Dawn of Venus was inspired by classical mythological canons, one
like that Venus should look confident and the shell she should be
standing in is rather big and pretty. We don’t get it in this painting,
instead we see Venus in rather vulnerable than confident position.
She sits in the shell that rests on the bottom of the sea. Shell is
showed as a canonical piece and, in my opinion, without it the
character of Venus won't look the same.

From the Birth of Paradise (1982)

Edward Allington
Artist's idea here was to combine both traditional style and the new
bright street art culture. Shells are usually only to be seen in the
classical artworks, so what we see here is a piece of common item
that appears on a lot of art works from past times.

The Resurrection: Port Glasgow

Sir Stanley Spencer

Once again here we can see that shell represents past. The whole
idea of Spencer`s Resurrection was about how in the bible there was
written that in the end of times all the people will be revived. The
painting shows, earlier dead, now alive people crawling out of their
graveyards, but that's not something bad, on the other hand its
completely opposite. People greet each other and everyone are
happy that they are alive again. We see the shell in the bottom left
corner. It doesn’t mean anything in my opinion, it is there to show
for how long these people were in their graves.

All information was taken from https://www.tate.org.uk .