This is Sorcha Carey’s first Folkestone Triennial as curator, but the festival has a firm reputation now as this is its sixth edition. It’s my first to review, so I feel like I’m starting alongside her to see a town I know in a fresh light that an expansive art show like this brings to its host location. She explains that the trigger points for thinking about the show were found in the collections basement of Folkestone Museum.
The exhibition spreads out onto the cliffs around the bay, some of its important works clutching to the grassy edgelands and others spreading out along the harbour arm into the bay. This is an exhibition of 18 artists, so in the space of this overview, my review will take you on a walk around the significant locations that stood out to me.
We begin at the headquarters of Creative Folkestone with Emilija Škarnulytė whose film installation ‘Burial’ takes us into the broken terrifying beauty of the Ignalina Power Plant in Lithuania which is in the process of being decommissioned. Using wonderful footage from inside this demanding, nuclear bunker, connecting it to pagan symbols from pre-history of the Baltic serpent and Estruscal mortuary chambers and including other thematic and dramatic locations such as the research ground in France, we visit impossible and vast locations that feel beyond the human. We are in the dark, our experience heightened by the dry ice and the reflective floor.
However, in contrast to this beginning, the exhibition is one of light, and we immediately pour out into the playful primary characters of Monster Chetwynd’s ‘Salamander Playground’. Influenced by illustrations, these are cuddly despite being rendered in hard-cremation fibreglass, and the first statue gets a hug. I can’t wait to see the realisation of the full playground one day. For now, the salamander will travel around different sites in Folkestone, making friends with the public and being an ambassador for the show.
We take a cab up the hill to see up close the works on at the far side, and encounter Sara Trillo’s ‘Urn Field’ inspired by Iron Age clay cremation urns found in Folkestone. It’s impressive how artists have been responding to the local collections. Sara Trillo cannot stop herself from thinking about the environment and the inclusion of materials in antique manufacturing. Her pieces incorporate elements of plants, such as wild carrot, grass, blackthorn, and plantain, telling stories of these plants and incorporating them into this strewn sculpture space. It is wild, yet she had, with accomplices, to clear the space to make paths and places for the urns to sit and be visited. It is a kind of wild gardening, but the kind that is only facilitated by such an ambitious and generously-thinking project.
Up on the hill, I walk on and around Jennifer Tee’s brick and glass ‘Oceans Tree of Life’ and listen to the migratory hybrid audio piece by Hanna Tuulikki. All the time the sea is swirling around the bottom of the cliff, the live birds are criss-crossing around the clifftop.
We walk down toward to the Martello Tower to see the encyclopaedic amulet collection put together in the round by Katie Paterson and curators. A smooth sycamore table curves with the round room, with dips in which reproductions of talismans from around the world nestle like planets in their gravitational fields. The research on the items must have taken a wide but shallow swim around ancient culture, with nearly 200 sourced from Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Viking, Islamic, Pre-Columbian and other international traditions. They have been recreated in different materials, with no repeats, including Neoprene, space junk, mined aluminium, charcoal, materials that reflect the impact of climate change. It’s an exhibition that allows you to follow your path tracing the trail of your particular planet, spinning off into galaxy of ideas and thoughts, guilt and concerns about the state of the world.
It’s a walk down the hill into the harbour, via a church installed exhibit ‘Song Dynasty’ by Rae-Yen Song. A fabled imaginary creature hovers in its pink skirt of light above the congregation. It seems a symbol of redemption and calls into mind for me, the literary association of the tiny creatures ‘that crawl with legs upon the slimy sea’ from the Ancient Mariner (S.T. Coleridge) which he blesses in order that the albatross falls from his neck and he re-enters the world. I think few would have my particular association, but I feel it’s my way of echoing the feeling of sanctuary of the spirt-beast host for lost humans.
Down in the harbour, I am led through the disused harbour station to what for me are two of the standout pieces. First, Laure Prouvost’s ‘Above Frontiers, Oui Connect’ marks the entrance to the harbour, the charming terrazzo gull-like bird with three elongated heads stretching in different directions. It communicates with its child across two structures, making the harbourness in Folkestone, the town’s historical function as a port of entrance and departure. Cerberus the multi-headed dog defends the underworld. This bird is a friendlier yet still parallel creature. Curator Sorcha Carey made this point, but I believe it too.
Finally, in this shortened version of the whistle-stop tour, we encounter ‘Red Erratic’ by Dorothy Cross lurking beneath the walkway, steps leading down to its Damascus Rose marble. A huge block of incredible power, its round beauty is topped off with vulnerable feet perched on the top, forced to find shelter in less and less space. Despite its monumental materialism, the block has been craned into a platform beneath the pier, where tides lap over its edge and rise, threatening to wash the block into the ocean. This work speaks for those forced to migrate to safer lands but who find less and less safety with every footstep.
The powerful emotions attached to real-world issues, raised by Red Erratic, leave me feeling this is indeed a focused show. The curation I admire, and one of the things I love, is the management details of these complex pieces. Apparently, ‘Red Erratic’ will be washed with non-seawater every few days to prevent the build-up of salt.
I hope I have encouraged those who can to visit the Folkestone Triennial during its installation over the next three months. I send my compliments to the organising body, Creative Folkestone. I hope that other towns will look at this model and embrace the idea of a Triennial. The three-year lead-in time allows site-specific work to be developed, which is reflected in the pieces and the ideas they explore through research, making, and interaction with the curator.
Folkestone Triennial, 19 July – 19 October 2025