The salty nooks of this harbour town are the setting for a bleakly brilliant coastal festival taking in migrants’ plight, water pollution, burial urns – and some sweet relief.
Folkestone doesn’t have a pier. It has an Arm. That’s what the harbour’s long walkway into the Channel is called. It is a suitably surreal, even grotesque setting for the Folkestone Triennial artworks that infest its salty nooks and crannies – or armpits and elbow crooks. Laure Prouvost has placed a mutant seabird, with three heads and an electric plug on its tail, on the adjacent concrete stump of the defunct ferry terminal. Surprising? Not really if you have just visited The Ministry of Sewers, an installation by Cooking Sections that documents and protests the poisoning of our rivers and seas.
If you head on to the next Martello tower you might be momentarily cheered up by Jennifer Tee’s wavy picture of a giant kelp, mapped in the grass in brown bricks which also have sea kelp and other life forms imprinted on their surfaces. It makes you look out to the sea below and imagine the threatened life it holds.
—Jonathan Jones
