There is something endearing about a mackerel sky: soft, fluffy clouds like little, round sheep, the pretty white-on-blue celestial design. Sophie Barber seems to think so, too: her exhibition at Hastings Contemporary, the first in her hometown of Hastings, is titled Mackerel sky, mackerel sky, never long wet, never long dry. Titles have always been an important part of Barber’s work, appearing at the bottom of her paintings like captions, thick and smeary and coloured blood-red. Sometimes, the words are misspelt, as in The Year Your Born (2025), which is partly because – as the interim gallery director, Kathleen Soriano, tells us – the artist is dyslexic, but I get the impression that it is more the inherent sense of imperfection and directness to which Barber is drawn.

In Where the sun meets the sea and the sea meets me (2025), a giant orange sun sits squarely on a cobalt-blue sea against the backdrop of a pitch-black sky (the full subscript has that misspelling again, reading “Where the sun meetsea and the see meets me”). There is some sort of irregularity in the painting itself, too: a midnight sky does not rhyme with a sun with giant sunrays. I didn’t notice it at first, caught up as I was in the wholeness of the work, which extends over the gallery floor like the waves of the sea in the painting, lapping up the sand. The sun did strike me as a little aggressive, until Barber told us that the painting started as a vegetable painting and the sun was first a radish, but the radish didn’t please her, so she painted over it. And then I can’t unsee it: the round forms of the radish’s head hiding inside the giant circle of the sun. Calling it a landscape doesn’t do this painting justice; it is a happening, an occasion: alive and immersive.

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