Can art spruce up a faded seaside town?
Folkestone Triennial
Various locations, Folkestone ★★★★★
Art isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of Folkestone. It probably isn’t the second either. However, thanks to the local arts charity Creative Folkestone, the
Kentish town has had its own art triennial since 2008. The fifth edition, postponed from 2020 because of Covid, opens this week. Twentyfive artists are showing newly commissioned work across town – for free, and mostly outdoors.
What makes Folkestone ripe for this kind of treatment is its history. A popular resort and port in Victorian times, it declined in the 20th century with the advent of mass tourism abroad and the Eurostar. Its crosschannel ferry service ended in 2001. All of this has left parts of the town derelict and ready for artistic
intervention. In Surface Flows, Tina Gverović has painted items of blue clothing on the old ferry ramp in Folkestone harbour. They suggest the goods that used to flow in and out of the town by sea; as well as the refugees who, to this day, arrive on British shores with nothing but the clothes on their back.
Inevitably for an event with many disparate elements, the triennial is hit-and-miss, and where Gverović hits, Jason Wilsher-mills misses. His sculpture, I am Argonaut, on the clifftop promenade, is placed opposite a permanent statue of Folkestone’s famous son, William Harvey.
In 1628, Harvey became the first person to
accurately explain the function of the heart and the circulation of blood around the body. In his statue, he duly holds a human heart in his left hand. Wilsher-mills’s sculpture, however, is of a garishly coloured mutant figure in his underpants. He’s considerably shorter and podgier than Harvey, and points to a hole in his chest, missing a heart. He laughs at the great physician – the joke being that he’d like the one in Harvey’s hand. More successful are the works that invite multiple interpretations, such as Pilar Quinteros’s Janus’s Fortress: Folkestone, a monumental chalk head with two faces: one is facing inland, the other towards continental Europe. The
allusion to Brexit is clear, but might the head also represent Folkestone itself, having to confront the future but always looking to its past? The chalk will disintegrate over the course of the triennial, as a reflection on coastline erosion.
This year’s commissions aren’t quite enough in themselves to justify a trip to Kent. However, a selection of works from each edition of the triennial end up staying in the town permanently – pieces by Tracey Emin (2008), Cornelia Parker (2011) and Antony Gormley (2017) among them.
It seems fairer to view the editions as part of a cumulative attempt to make the landscape more artistic. It’s a different model of cultural planning from that of nearby Margate, which in 2011 simply built a new museum (Turner Contemporary) – and, in its way, it’s much more interesting.