ART FOR ALL

SOME HIGHLIGHTS

We’ve chosen a few of our favourites, but a full list and map of all the sites is available from Creative Folkestone.

Cornelia Parker’s Folkestone Mermaid, 2011 is one of the town’s most loved artworks.
Parker was looking for ‘a real person, a free spirit’ and was keen that all women over 18 living in Folkestone should be offered the opportunity to model for the mermaid.

The Kentish Express (July 2010) carried an article with the heading “Wanted: one mermaid, any shape or size”, which also explained the life-casting process that would be used. Through this process of open submission, Parker chose Georgina Baker, mother of two and Folkestone born and bred.

Location: The Stade, Folkestone CT19 6NN
End of The Stade, overlooking Sunny Sands
What3Words: BIRTHING.FEELS.UPSETTING

Art Buff is a graffiti artwork by Banksy created in Folkestone in 2014. The work depicts a woman wearing headphones and staring at a plinth, upon which rests a patch of painted-out graffiti. The name of the piece is a play on words, “buff” being a slang term for the painting over of graffiti.

Location: Courtyard, 69 The Old High Street, 11 Tontine Street, Folkestone
CT20 1RN

What3Words: ///trunk.giant.depth

Antony Gormley loaned three figures from his Another Time series of one hundred solid cast-iron figures which were dispersed around the world. Two were on display in Folkestone and one, in a collaboration with Turner Contemporary in Margate, in front of the Gallery. Thanks to an extension of the loan the figure in the half tide loading platform on Folkestone’s Harbour Arm remains.

Location: Loading Bay, Folkestone Harbour Arm, Harbour Approach Road, Folkestone CT20 1QH
What3Words: CLEANSER.POLO.STRAY

Richard Woods’ Holiday Home installation is in fact six one-third size ‘homes’ identical except for their colour ways.  They appear in ‘unlikely’ places, suggesting that no site is too small, too unlikely, or too inconvenient for its neighbours, for a holiday home.  Woods is commenting on housing inequity.

HOLIDAY HOME 2017
Location: various sites around the town

No. 1054 Arpeggio is the title of Rana Begum’s extraordinary colourful design that transforms around 120 beach huts on the seafront between Folkestone and Sandgate along Lower Saxon Way. The number refers to the sequence of the artist’s completed artworks, while an ‘arpeggio’ is a sequence of notes from a chord played in a rising or descending order.

Folkestone & Hythe District Council’s decision to refurbish its entire stock of beach huts presented Creative Folkestone Triennial with a challenging and idiosyncratic opportunity to commission an artist to make a major artistic statement. Rana Begum’s response to the invitation was both extremely ambitious and also generous, an astonishing blossoming of her studio practice (and its concern with geometry, colour and light) on a vast scale. Her superimposed, graduated colour scheme, and the insistent rhythm of her trademark chevron design, have turned a half-mile marching rank of beach huts into notes of colour on a keyboard, certainly one of the largest and most joyful artworks in the country.

Location: Mermaids Beach
Folkestone CT20 2JP
What3Words:  SOIL.LIMITS.RESTS