Artworks
Banksy
Art Buff is a graffiti artwork by Banksy which was created in Folkestone in 2014, Banksy announcing it as "part of the Folkestone triennial. Kind of".
Adam Chodzko
Adam Chodzko’s work as an artist demonstrates an ongoing interest in collapsing the past, present and future – in order to create ‘alternative realities’. Through fantasy, wonder and make-believe, Chodzko's work compels us to re-consider our sense of place and community.
A K Dolven
A K Dolven’s installation ‘Out of Tune’ features a sixteenth century tenor bell from Scraptoft Church in Leicestershire, which had been removed for not being in tune with the others.
Antony Gormley
Another Time 1999-2013 is a series of one hundred solid cast-iron figures, destined by the artist to be dispersed around the world.
Assemble
Assemble (founded 2010), the Turner Prize-Winning multi-disciplinary collective, have collaborated with local skate boarders to develop Skating Situations at the Harbour Arm.
Bill Woodrow
This crystalline modernist architectural composition, echoing the white cliffs between Folkestone and Dover, supports figures of an Inuit and a seal, and sits on a black puddle shape.
Bob and Roberta Smith
Bob and Roberta Smith is a British contemporary artist, activist, art education advocate, writer and musician.
Christian Boltanski
Christian Boltanski’s The Whispers, commissioned for Folkestone Triennial 2008, is a sound installation sited at four benches on The Leas.
Cornelia Parker
Parker has created a Folkestone version of one of the most popular tourist attractions in the world, Copenhagen’s ‘Little Mermaid’.
Cristina Iglesias
Cristina Iglesias’s architectural intervention on the ramparts of Martello 4 offers the illusion of an entrance into another world.
David Shrigley
Shrigley's witty sculpture comments on this transition by taking a piece of 'heritage' and re-presenting it as 'creativity'.
Diane Dever and The Decorators
Diane Dever is an inter-disciplinary artist/curator/producer who works collaboratively to explore the intersections of public, private and liminal space.
Diane Dever & Jonathan Wright
Diane Dever and Jonathan Wright both live in Folkestone and produced their first (and to date only) artistic collaboration in the form of a series of five sculptures called Pent Houses.
Gary Woodley
Gary Woodley works in many three-dimensional media including architectural interventions using various lighting technologies. He has researched three-dimensional CAD modelling systems for topological projections onto real and virtual spaces.
Gilbert & George
For Creative Folkestone Triennial 2020, celebrated artists Gilbert & George (established 1967) contribute a selection of their powerful and ever-topical pictures to be exhibited on billboards and poster sites around the town.
Hamish Fulton
Internationally acclaimed and Kent-based artist Hamish Fulton created a 5×4.6m metal sign, mapping the 31 water-related walks he had made (up to 2010) from coast to coast, river to river, coast to river, across the British Isles and western Europe over his 40-year career.
HoyCheong Wong, Simon Davenport & Shahed Saleem
HoyCheong Wong, Simon Davenport and architect Shahed Saleem, contribute an artwork to the Southeast Kent Islamic Cultural Centre (Folkestone Mosque) in Foord Road South, evolved through design workshops with the Islamic community and Madrasa.
Ian Hamilton Finlay
Ian Hamilton Finlay, who died in 2006, was a British artist active in the second half of the last century, who exercised enormous influence on other artists of his own and subsequent generations. His work encompasses a variety of different media and discourses.
Jacqueline Poncelet
Jacqueline Poncelet (b. 1947, Belgium) has created two works for Folkestone Triennial. Looking Ahead pierces the retaining wall of the old Ship Street Gasworks site. Shimmera captures the energy of the new development in Mill Bay, beckoning to the green park in one direction and the blue sea in the other.
Jonathan Wright
Jonathan Wright works with images, materials and structures derived from the fabric of modernity. But since he is also fascinated by craft techniques, his compositions using this modernist vocabulary often become mysterious and seemingly functionless through the intervention of personal and felt elements, in a personalised and romantic critique of the modernist project.
Lubaina Himid
Lubaina Himid has collected ceramic jelly moulds for many years, and often adds to them her own painted pattern decorations.
Marc Schmitz + Dolgor Ser-Od
Like the acoustic mirrors, the horn shape of Siren is capable of amplifying sound coming from far away, but adds the possibility of ‘speaking back’ by also functioning as a megaphone. Siren gathers the noise of the waves (like a sea shell) and is also a reminder of the fog horn that until recently sounded from the Harbour Arm Lighthouse.
Mariko Hori
Mariko Hori (b. 1985, Japan) was inspired by Folkestone’s zig-zag path, built in the 1920s from Pulhamite to appear as natural rocks and grottos. In her work, Mellowing the Corners, Mariko Hori has created Pulhamite ‘boulders’ on three different sites, which will contain objects donated by residents instead of rubbish.
Mark Dion
Mark Dion’s work incorporates aspects of natural history, archaeology, ecology, detection and systems of classification. Commissioned for the 2008 Folkestone Triennial, Dion’s staffed mobile unit in the shape of a seagull provides information about these unloved birds in the hope of promoting a better understanding and appreciation of them.
Mark Wallinger
Mark Wallinger’s ‘Folk Stones’ at first appears like an almost banal numbering exercise, a “significant yet pointless act” as he puts it, recalling the labour of a modern-day Sisyphus. Yet the precise number of beach pebbles collected and laid out into a massive square reveals a profound underpinning: 19,240 individually numbered stones stand for the exact number of British soldiers killed on 1st July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme.
Michael Craig-Martin
'Folkestone Lightbulb' stands over the junction of two of the most important streets in Folkestone’s old town, Tontine Street and The Old High Street, at the gateway to the Creative Quarter.
Michael Sailstorfer
'Folkestone Digs', by Berlin-based Michael Sailstorfer, was developed in secrecy in the lead up to the opening day of Folkestone Triennial 2014, when the announcement was made that 30 individual pieces of 24-carat gold had been buried under the sand of the Outer Harbour beach.
muf Architecture/Art
For Folkestone Triennial 2014, muf’s community participation-driven design rejuvenated an area known as Payers Park, which up to that time had been dilapidated and negatively perceived in the town. The extensive landscaping and redesign now offers an oasis of green space between the Creative Quarter, Grace Hill and Rendezvous Street, to be used by all sections of the community.
Nathan Coley
British seaside towns are often associated with retirement and the idea of a “last resort“. The melancholy of these locations is touched upon by Nathan Coley’s illuminated text sculpture, 'Heaven Is A Place Where Nothing Ever Happens', seen against the sky in Tontine Street.
Pablo Bronstein
Pablo Bronstein is one of the most exciting artists of his generation, combining interests in art and architecture with performance, installation and sculpture. For the 2014 Triennial, he was invited to consider how to enliven the row of utilitarian concrete beach huts that line the inland edge of Lower Saxon Way.
Pae White
Having observed pensioners unable to walk far and stranded on benches, their dogs listless or straining at the lead, Pae White designed her ‘Barking Rocks’ park especially for the needs of both: now the elderly can rest and chat or picnic while their dogs exercise and play.
Paloma Varga Weisz
Varga Weisz’s five-headed sculpture, it's body wrapped in blankets and cardboard, appears stranded and forlorn.
Patrick Corillon
Patrick Corillon’s (b. 1959, Belgium) series of five sculptural relic-boxes have been inspired by his dialogue with a group of local residents. Located on the course of St Eanswythe’s waterway, the boxes and relics refer to children’s games and to St. Eanswythe herself.
Pilar Quinteros
Co-commissioned by England’s Creative Coast, a landmark partnership project connecting the landscape and arts organisations across the South East coast, artist Pilar Quinteros (b.1988, Chile) presents Janus’ Fortress: Folkestone. Quinteros works across drawing, sculpture, performance, and video. Her works are often intentionally fragile and made from unusual or recycled materials.
Patrick Tuttofuoco
Tuttofuoco and two of his collaborators re-enacted the classic journey from Istanbul to Paris and Folkestone.
Rana Begum
Rana Begum (b. 1977, Bangladesh), has designed a special colour scheme to enliven more than one hundred new and refurbished beach huts on Lower Saxon Way.
Richard Deacon
Richard Deacon’s (b. 1949, Wales) work for Folkestone Triennial, Benchmark nos 1-5, is a result of his ongoing preoccupation with plinths and the crucial role they have played in the development of sculpture.
Richard Wilson
The former Rotunda Amusement Park, typical of seaside towns from Blackpool to Coney Island, is the inspiration for Richard Wilson’s 18 Holes.
Richard Wentworth
Racinated, Richard Wentworth’s ten-part deep-blue enamel sign piece, is spread across Folkestone’s promenades, alleyways and avenues.
Richard Woods
Holiday Home (six one-third size ‘homes’ identical except in their colourways) is in ‘unlikely’ places – suggesting that no site is too small, too unlikely, or too inconvenient for its neighbours, for a holiday home.
Rigo 23
Earth’s Oldest Satellite reminds us that earth’s closest neighbour may as often be beneath our feet as above our heads.
rootoftwo
For Folkestone Triennial 2014, rootoftwo has created Whithervanes, a Neurotic Early Worrying System (NEWS) consisting of a network of sculptures in the form of five headless chickens, to be presented on the highest points of five buildings.
Sarah Staton
For Folkestone Triennial 2014, Staton has developed Steve, conceived as a 'people friendly sculpture' or a personified sculptural pavilion, and placed on The Stade.
Sinta Tantra
Tantra's bold interventions use colour abstractions that wrap themselves around architectural environments, transforming them in the process.
Sol Calero
Although she lives and works in Berlin, Sol Calero's art has the freshness and colour we might associate with Latin America
Stephenie Bergman
Stephenie Bergman (b. 1946, England) is recognised internationally for her ceramic sculptures whose forms are grounded in everyday functionality. For the Triennial, she is contributing sculptures that play on forms we associate with medicine – from pills to organs, veins and arteries.
Strange Cargo
Strange Cargo’s Triennial contribution was an illustrated alternative guidebook of their hometown, Folkestone.
Studio Ben Allen
Studio Ben Allen is a multidisciplinary design practice founded in 2014 that operates at the intersection of architecture, design and art.
Tina Gverović
Tina Gverović (b.1975, Croatia) works with many different media, often to create immersive, disorientating installations on the theme of space, territory and identity.
Tonico Lemos Auad
The various Carrancas situated in the inner and outer harbour are inspired by nature, harnessing tidal currents to hide then reveal, as well as shape the work.
Tracey Emin
Tracey Emin’s art is one of disclosure, using events from her personal life as inspiration for her work.
Will Kwan
Will Kwan’s work is grounded in social and political awareness, with a keen eye for cultural difference and the power structures encoded in cultural manifestations.
Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono is an artist whose thought-provoking work challenges people’s understanding of art and the world around them.
Winter/Hörbelt
The German artist duo Wolfgang Winter and Berthold Hörbelt, Winter/Hörbelt (established 1992) contribute a striking sculptural intervention to the Shellons Street crossing, a key location in the urban landscape.