TIDE & TIME

A new solo exhibition by Laura Callaghan
24–29 November 2026 | Brighton Fishing Quarter Gallery | 10am–4pm daily

We usually measure time by clocks and calendars.

The coast measures it differently.

Through the pull and retreat of the tide. The changing phases of the moon. The angle of the light across the water. Winter storms and summer shallows. Sea kale emerging along the shoreline. Things flowering, seeding, disappearing and returning.

Tide & Time is my new solo exhibition, coming to Brighton Fishing Quarter Gallery this November, and it has grown from a year of returning to the Sussex coast and noticing these quieter ways in which time passes.

Not travelling somewhere new in search of a different landscape, but looking more closely at the one already around me.

Returning to the same place

Much of my work has always begun with the sea.

But increasingly I’ve become interested not simply in looking at the coast, but in what happens when we build a relationship with one particular place over time.

The same stretch of water is never really the same.

A familiar beach can be transformed overnight by a storm. Rocks disappear beneath sand and emerge again months later. The colour of the water shifts. Plants arrive and retreat. Objects are washed ashore. The moon changes the tide, and the tide rearranges the shore.

And alongside those physical changes are our own.

We return to places carrying different things with us: experiences, relationships, memories, losses. A landscape becomes layered with the people we have walked through it with and the versions of ourselves who have stood there before.

By returning, we begin to belong.
By belonging, we learn to care.

That idea sits at the heart of Tide & Time.

A year by the sea

The exhibition will bring together painting, cyanotype and work created on recovered marine materials, following different rhythms of time along the coast.

I’m making work around lunar cycles and tides, alongside the turning points of the year: the solstices and equinoxes, changing seasons, weather and light.

Some works are large seascapes. Others are tiny observations and collected fragments.

I’m also returning to existing paintings and materials and allowing them to change. An older painting, sitting unsold for years, is becoming something new. Pieces of discarded plastic recovered from the coast become surfaces for painted seas. Cyanotype uses sunlight itself to leave a record of natural material.

There is something I like about that circularity.

Returning to a place. Returning to a material. Returning to an old piece of work. Looking again.

Not everything needs to begin from a blank surface.

Painting time

I’ve been particularly drawn to the moon while developing this exhibition.

Of course, the moon gives us one of our oldest ways of marking time, but beside the sea its presence is physical too. Its gravitational pull helps create the tides that continually reshape the coastline.

I’ve been exploring lunar phases through watercolour and cyanotype, as well as bringing moons into my painted seascapes and works on recovered plastic.

Alongside them, the four solstices and equinoxes give the exhibition another kind of clock: four points around which the year turns.

Together these different works are beginning to form a kind of sea calendar, not a precise record of dates, but an accumulation of colour, material, weather, tide, light and memory.

TIDE & TIME

I’ll be sharing much more of the work as the exhibition develops over the coming weeks.

For now, I would love you to save the dates and come and experience it in person.

TIDE & TIME
Solo exhibition by Laura Callaghan

Tuesday 24 – Sunday 29 November 2026
10am–4pm daily
Brighton Fishing Quarter Gallery
Brighton seafront

Free entry. Original artwork will be available to purchase, and my commission diary will also be open.