Mock up of Bob and Roberta Smith’s proposed Folkestone Is An Art School / Picture Robert Smith
Has it been three years already? Time for another look at the upcoming arty happenings in Kent for the Folkestone Triennial.
My visit to Folkestone for the 2014 Triennial was a real treat – for the art and for the chance to discover this lovely little seaside town on the Kentish coast. So I was most pleased to hear the plans about this year’s citywide and mostly outdoor exhibition at a recent press event.
At the event Alastair Upton of the Creative Foundation (an independent visionary arts charity dedicated to enabling the regeneration of Folkestone) alongside Triennial curator Lewis Biggs announced there’ll be a collection of new artworks to be exhibited in public spaces around town under the title double edge, with some of the art due to remain in the town to add to its expanding art collection, Folkestone Artworks.
Said Biggs of the double edge title:
The title double edge keys ambiguity first of all, and has two principal meanings following from that – the first is anxiety: the edge of the world, the edge of the future and the unknown. The second is the notion of balance, released through the artist’s imagination when one tips over the edge and looks back on the known with a renewed perspective. Great art is a mirror to the world, and this exhibition gives artists the opportunity to make new work that plays with ambiguity and stimulates audiences to consider broader issues such as why the world is the way it is, how it might be, and how change is always possible.
The 2017 artists are Rigo 23, Sol Calero, Michael Craig-Martin, Antony Gormley, Carmody Groarke, Alex Hartley, Lubaina Himid, Ann Veronica Janssens, Emily Peasgood, Amalia Pica, Marc Schmitz and Dolgor Ser-Od, David Shrigley, Bob and Roberta Smith, Sinta Tantra, Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas, HoyCheong Wong, Gary Woodley, Bill Woodrow, Richard Woods, and Jonathan Wright.
Each artist will work on new site-specific commissions that respond to the physical and conceptual context of Folkestone, while building on the “sense of place” that guided the last Folkestone Triennial exhibition, Lookout, and exploring the theme of “double edges” and how it resonates with cultural, economic and political realities experienced as part of everyday lives in Folkestone and across the globe.
The Folkestone Triennial will run from 2 September to 5 November 2017. For details go to folkestonetriennial.org.uk.
