After the successful We See, The Sea programme, we have partnered with Sussex Bay to deliver an exhibition under the banner Sussex Bay Creates to demonstrate the ability of art to bring us together to learn, explore and experience.
From 21–25 October 2025, Colonnade House in Worthing will host an art exhibition that celebrates the start of the Sussex Bay project. Sussex Bay is a cross-sector initiative aiming to restore and protect the coastal and marine environments from Chichester Harbour to Camber Sands, and to connect the communities that depend on them.
This exhibition will;
– showcase a small group of contemporary artists working along the Sussex coast.
– explore what a “living sea” means … culturally / environmentally / socially: approach this through a spirit of radical optimism, of embracing hope as a radical and political act in the face of the climate emergency.
– act as a call to action, inviting artists, communities and partners to join a longer-term Sussex Bay creative network.
This exhibition features;
Laura Callaghan – Co-Curator
Laura Callaghan (b. Margate, 1983) is a mixed-media artist based in Saltdean, Brighton. Her practice is rooted in ecofeminism and inspired by the Sussex coastline, where the sea is both sanctuary and collaborator.
Working with paint, collage, and found materials – from beach-combed fragments to ephemera – Laura creates layered works that explore our cultural, emotional, and ecological relationships with the ocean. Her seascapes are at once personal and political: acts of reverence for the natural world and calls to defend it in the face of the climate emergency.
Hope is central to her work. For Laura, optimism itself is a radical and political act. It’s a way of imagining living seas restored, ecosystems revived, and communities thriving in connection with one another and with nature.
Her work has been exhibited across the UK, gaining recognition from figures such as Sir David Attenborough. She currently works from her seafront studio in Brighton.
Her work can be found online here and via social media.
Lila Wordsworth
Lila Wordsworth (b. 1986) is an interdisciplinary artist focused on place, humans and more-than-human consciousness. Through her practice, she interrogates the value of things, how we co-create our public and natural spaces, our role in the climate and biodiversity crises and how we can respond creatively to these issues. Her work is inspired by local plants and is made from discarded man-made materials and found natural objects. These urban & maritime waste streams, including seaweed, rusted objects, textiles, plastic waste and construction rubble all find their way into her studio where she then turns them into textiles, sculptures, pigments, dyes, cyanotype prints and photographs.
In March 2021, the Sussex seabed was given the chance to rest and recover from decades of trawling. Commissioned by ONCA environmental justice gallery in Brighton, and with kind help from Sussex Wildlife Trust and Brighton University, ‘The Untangling’ (2023) celebrates the profound impact the trawling ban is having on the Sussex seabed ecosystem. It is a tale of hope where the once shimmering kelp forests (colloquially known as ‘tangles’), formed of giant seaweed plants reaching up to 3m high, are starting to return to our local area.
Nina Garstang
Nina Garstang lives in Southwick and works from her studio in Portslade, situated at either end of Shoreham port. This stretch of coastline is where the solid unwavering industry meets the vast, shifting openness of the sea — a contrast which influences her work. Nina’s practice explores the physical, emotional, environmental, and philosophical relationships we hold with the sea — through our visceral experience, scientific inquiry, and the enduring power of folklore.
She collects discarded industrial fishing netting from the beach, reclaiming this toxic material to create sculptural installations. These works speak to our collective resourcefulness, offering a hopeful narrative of transformation when communities come together to challenge harmful practices. She invites audiences to rekindle their connection to the sea. For it is in this recognition of interconnectedness — with each other, with nature, and with our shared future, that the seeds of meaningful climate action are sown.
Nina studied Painting at the University of Brighton (BA) and the Royal College of Art, London (MA). Her passion for the sea and climate activism has been shaped by childhood summers on the beaches of Worthing, time spent experiencing ‘big nature’ in South America and Australia, and stories of her Scandinavian Viking heritage.
Emma Chow
Emma Chow is an interdisciplinary regenerative designer whose body of work is dedicated to being of service to Nature. Her artistic practice of botanical silk dyeing embodies regenerative principles, working with Nature’s cycles of life and death across the seasons and with post-life flowers and textiles.
Originally from Toronto, Canada, Emma now lives in Rye and recently moved from Hove.
This piece is from a collection of works made as part of the 2024 Stream to Sea residency with UNESCO Biosphere ‘The Living Coast’, University of Brighton, and ONCA. Emma explored the leading inquiry, How might we live in right-relationship with water in The Living Coast?, through public intergenerational workshops and by creating artefacts of places in the Biosphere; by using ethically-foraged botanicals and fallen flowers to dye organic peace silk produced in Hertfordshire. Flowers as the paint. Water as the alchemist, enabling a process of transformation.
Andy Ash
Andy Ash is an artist, researcher, and educator whose practice expands the idea of sculpture to include performance, film, photography, sound, drawing, print, text, and objects in installation or site-specific contexts. Collaboration, dialogue, and socially engaged approaches are central to his work. Based in Brighton with a studio at the Red Herring Artists’ Cooperative in Portslade, he is also an Associate Professor teaching postgraduates at UCL. Andy has exhibited locally, nationally, and internationally, with projects in Canada, Japan, Finland, the Czech Republic, and Spain, and has collaborated with institutions including Tate Exchange, Tate Britain, ICA, CVAN and Cambridge University.
Sussex Bay: Reverberation (2025) is a 45-minute series of sound pieces experienced on headphones. Recorded across the South Downs, along the River Adur, through Shoreham Port, and out to the Sussex Bay coast, the work explores walking and listening as intertwined ways of encountering land/seascape. From dawn chorus to shifting water and industrial acoustics, the recordings capture rhythms, atmospheres, and ephemeral details that walking makes audible. Positioned within sound art and acoustic ecology, the series frames the land/seascape as a living archive, where sound mediates presence, memory, and the embodied experience of journeying from Downs to sea.
Kate McMinnies
Kate is a Sussex based ceramic artist with a dynamic sculptural practice.
Kate’s abstract sculptures investigate the fluidity of our perceptions and understanding of the world around us.
Kate’s production process always begins on the wheel; varying speed and pressure, she shapes, pushes and pulls the clay, often to its limits – the lines and marks made during these processes are integral to emphasising a sense of flux and flow.
Over the past year Kate has been exploring notions of time within her sculpture. She has begun incorporating natural elements into her work – foraged clay, wood and flora. Where these materials come from is integral to the meaning of her pieces – connecting the work to a particular space, but also communicating ideas about change – time past and present.
Simon Roberts
Simon Roberts (b.1974) is a visual artist based in Brighton, UK, recognised for his large-format, tableaux photographs exploring the socio-political fabric of Britain. His practice also encompasses video, text and installation, which together, interrogate notions of identity, belonging, and the complex relationship between history, place and culture.
Simon presents; A Daily Sea.
On March 19th, 2020, the UK entered a nationwide lockdown to prevent the spread of the virus known as COVID-19. From this day, Brighton-based photographer Simon Roberts began a series of daily photographs posted to his Instagram account, focussing on the sea near his home and pairing each seascape captured with a related poem or quote. His daily photographs continued throughout the year covering all three national lockdowns and finished on 19 March 2021.
In such moments of collective and personal upheaval, the sea represents one of the few ever-present, physical constants in the world, whose calming effects are well-known. But the sea is also symbolic of life: tranquil one moment, turbulent the next, it represents the unpredictability of existence; its smooth, placid surface may conceal a raging storm to come.
The photographs represent an extended meditation on this most significant time in our shared history. Through this repetition, itself a meditative act, we see one sea in 365 ways, sometimes rough and tumultuous, other times serene and mellow, from dawn to dusk. The photographs of this ever-changing body of water are unified by one horizon throughout; the remarkable point at which the sea seems to touch the sky.
Tuesday – Saturday // 10.00 – 17.00
