You can spend an enjoyable day roaming around the Folkestone Triennial (to 19th Oct), with 25 new works from 18 artists plus 80-odd retained as permanent from the previous five iterations. It helps to be reasonably fit as there are plenty of hills! The official theme this year is ‘How Lies the Land?’ with an emphasis on the histories embedded in it. Fair enough, but a little less seriously I found myself drawn to several works featuring birds and animals and decided to go with that in my selection.
Katie Paterson: ‘Afterlife’, 2025 (detail at top)
You can argue that the smallest works in the Triennial make the biggest collective impact. Katie Paterson, the artist who deals most effectively with deep time, has ranged 200 amulets around a ring-shaped wooden table large enough to fill a Martello Tower – as, indeed, it does. They are her versions of archaeological finds from museums around the world, cast in a wide range of materials from some of the world’s most fragile and endangered landscapes – such as glaciers losing their ice, coral reefs suffering damage, and islands at risk from rising seas. Tributes, warnings and wishes come together through objects originally made for their protective powers, as – says Paterson – ‘future memories of places under threat’. For example, the Ancient Egyptian amulet shown at the top is made from fish attractants, marking the rapid decline of North Pacific salmon.
Laure Prouvost: ‘Above Front Tears, Oui Connect’ 2025
The most photogenic sculpture in the Triennial may be Laure Prouvost’s punnily-titled three-headed bird with a somewhat paradoxically one-headed chick nearby. She’s made three of them: the others are on the Belgian and French coasts at De Panne and Dunkirk, so they form a playful network that crosses the frontiers that cause so much trouble in the world. That makes them connectors, which must explain my favourite feature, the plug in the mother’s tail. That said, Prouvost’s delightfully accented and eccentric commentary on the Triennial’s website talks more about the inspiration of her grandmother, who apparently loves to fly free in her own way by dangling out of a light aircraft, naked and tied to a rope…
Hanna Tuulikki: ‘Love (Warbler Remix)’, 2025
Here’s Hanna Tuulikki dressed as a Love Warbler, another fictional bird with a positive message about crossing boundaries. She was inspired by the real life Marsh Warbler, which breeds in northern Europe before making its passage to overwinter in South Africa. It composes its song entirely through the mimicry of other birds, resulting in a mashup of European and Africans species’ songs. Tuulikki’s Love Warbler is a human equivalent: she collected human love songs from 27 countries on the Marsh Warbler’s migration route, and matched each with some of the warbler’s sampled sounds. This is to remix not just sounds but the idea of territory, correctly seeing migration as ‘not this disruptive force, but as a process that is central to all life on Earth’.
john gerrard: ‘Ghost Feed’, 2025
Taking inspiration from the local prevalence of flint, the key to Stone Age tools, john gerrard screens footage of a Brazilian forest being burned for agricultural clearance, onto which he has imposed a spider monkey – generated virtually – that appears to be transfixed by the ultimate modern too, an iPhone. The monkey’s phone shows a live video of its own face—an endless loop where the monkey watches itself as the world around unfolds its future fate. That suggests how the online world acts as a distraction and immobiliser inhibiting the action needed.
Monster Chetwynd: ‘Salamander’, 2025
This is one of two colourful giant fibreglass salamanders planned for the Triennial by Monster Chetwynd – the other has been delayed – as forerunners to a playground to be designed by her and incorporating several such sculptures. Speaking from a salamander suit, Chetwynd has explained that she loves the semi-mythical creatures, and is especially inspired by their ability to regenerate not just a lost tail à la lizard, but limbs, spinal cords, and parts of the eye, brain, and heart. Her sculptures celebrate salamanders’ ability to survive, adapt and transform. In her playground, they will take on human poses, holding swings, slides and climbing frames and inviting us to dream through play.
Mark Dion: ‘The Mobile Gull Appreciation Unit’, 2008
This, my thematic choice from previous editions, comes from the first Triennial. It is a staffed unit that is moved around the town as its name implies, allowing the distribution from within of ‘information about the evolution, ethnology, natural history, environmental status and folklore’ about what visiting American artist Mark Dion characterised as ‘the most conspicuous non-human denizens of Folkestone’. It takes the form of the Mediterranean Gull – rarer than most gulls, but found in larger numbers locally than anywhere else in the UK. For large numbers, it seems, read plain large…
Nicolas Deshayes: ‘Life Drawing’ at Salon 186
A lively range of alternative spaces and pop-ups run alongside the official triennial. The quality varies, of course, but there are plenty of good artists living in or near Folkestone. For example, I caught the first day of the first exhibition to be held at the joint studio of ceramicist Ceri Elliston and painter Frank Pudney, at 186 Dover Road. 53 works by 30-odd artists included this wittily-titled sketch by Nicolas Deshayes, a Dover-based French artist who has an excellent show in London at the moment (at Modern Art, Bury Street). The study, related to one of his a typical ceramics, was made from an online image of a stuffed seal in a museum.
I liked three other off-Triennial shows: Ruth Canning’s ‘Plants Play Guitars’, which delivered exactly that at Gallery 66 by detecting pot plants’ electrical pulses and connecting them to automatic plectrum devices; ‘Landscapes of Hope’, for which Becca Pelly-Fry brings Rachael Champion and Susie Olczak together at School Gallery; and an extensive retrospective of Vanessa Winship’s photography at Kollectiv.
