Folkestone Triennial 2025: A Living Art Gallery by the Sea

Folkstone Trinnial 2025 | Creative Folkestone

What if an entire seaside town were a canvas of art? What if you could walk along chalk cliffs, the wind-battered Martello towers, and even the sewage systems become illustrations of world-class art? From 19 July to 19 October 2025, the port town of Folkestone (Kent, United Kingdom) realized the vision with the sixth edition of the Folkestone Triennial. One of the most ambitious public art exhibitions in the United Kingdom reveals a bold new theme: How Lies the Land?
An art festival that induces dialogue across time, culture, and ecology. Curated by Sorcha Carey, the Triennial transforms streets, seafronts, and civic structures into living, breathing installations that provoke one to think beyond. Folkstone invites 18 artists and visitors from across the world to question what’s buried beneath your feet, and what still lies ahead.

Excavating Place: A Curatorial Vision

According to Sorcha Carey (former Director of the Edinburgh Art Festival) How Lies the Land? is rooted in landscape, archaeology, and metaphor. Drawing on local fossil discoveries such as a hippopotamus tooth found in local gravel deposits, Carey frames the land as inherently mobile and ecological, inviting visitors to sense Folkestone’s deep-time past alongside its present urban rhythms.

Coastline at Folkestone featuring Mratello Tower & Golf Course | Creative Folkestone

This edition is explicitly site-specific: artworks unfurl across disused railway bridges, Martello towers, shoreline piers, and community buildings, revealing Folkestone not as backdrop, but as a co-author of the artistic discourse.

Highlights: Art, Ecology & Activist Poetics

Afterlife by Katie Paterson

Installed in Martello Tower, Paterson’s multisensory work casts nearly 200 amulets spanning eras and cultures using planetary refuse: neoprene fibres, deep-sea plastics, and albatross-regurgitated material. These reimagined charms underscore that no salvation comes from magical objects, but from how we care for them every day.

Afterlife | Creative Folkestone

Oceans Tree of Life by Jennifer Tee

Dramatic, sea-frond sculptures made of handcrafted bricks decorated with marine imagery pay tribute to kelp’s critical role in carbon sequestration. Tee’s installation honours the seas and geological fossils that underpin the local chalk cliffs and the evolution of marine life.

The Edge of the Sea, Oceans Tree of Life | Creative Folkestone

Above Front Tears, Oui Connect by Laure Prouvost

Laure Prouvost’s surreal sculpture showcases a three-headed seabird composed of human arms and trailing power cords, representing the chaos of miscommunication. Both humorous and unsettling, it captures the tensions of translation and the fading ties between Britain and mainland Europe.

Above Front Tears, Qui Connect | Creative Folkestone

Red Erratic by Dorothy Cross

A monumental red marble block set in a tidal loading bay is carved with hyper-realistic human feet. During high tide, the sculpture floats as if souls are emerging from the sea. Dorothy Cross’s work speaks to the deep links between people and nature, as well as stories of migration and change.

Red Erratic | Creative Folkestone

Ghost Feed by John Gerrard

Displayed on a rooftop LED screen above a disused railway line near the Harbour, Ghost Feed reveals a solitary monkey scrolling endlessly on a phone within a scorched digital landscape. The slow, mesmerizing real‑time animation evokes a haunting commentary on technological overload and attention in the post‑human era.

Ghost Feed | Creative Folkestone

Urn Field by Sara Trillo

Set into Folkestone’s East Cliff, Trillo’s large cob sculptures imitate ancient Iron Age urns. Made of chalk cob, a material indigenous to the cliff. Each form is named after wild medicinal plants such as blackthorn, mugwort, and wild carrot. As their organic forms weather into the earth, they exemplify art that dissolves into place.

Urn Field | Creative Folkestone

Song Dynasty by Rae-Yen Song

Suspended in St Peter’s Church, Rae‑Yen Song’s five-metre textile creature blends Chinese dragon and lion dance traditions with the ancient resilience of sea worms. Made from heirloom fabrics and ceramics, the work tells a deeply personal story of ancestry, migration, and survival.

Song Dynasty | Creative Folkestone

Other noteworthy works include Dineo Seshee Raisibe Bopape’s engraved monolith reading “Curse dissolved”, J Maizlish Mole’s dystopian map in Folkestone in Ruins, Emeka Ogboh’s sound-based reflections on migration, Céline Condorelli’s wayfinding sculptures, and Monster Chetwynd’s playful participatory experiences.

Architecture & Regeneration: Folkestone as Living Gallery

The Festival anchors itself in heritage and regeneration as much as art. Creative Folkestone’s model of production-led urban renewal is unique. Here, art is in direct dialogue with the architectural context and local community. The Quarterhouse, a cultural venue designed by Alison Brooks in 2009, becomes a key example as it houses Burial, linking cultural creativity with urban regeneration.

Quarterhouse Arts Centre situated in the heart of Folkestone’s Creative Quarter | Creative Folkestone

The entire town becomes a site of artistic reflection. Forgotten paths, empty buildings, and hidden corners are brought back to life. Art merges with landscape, inviting people to experience Folkestone as an open-air gallery where the boundaries between art, environment, and everyday life gently dissolve.

Why It Matters: Resonance, Reflection & Coastal Culture

This Triennial arrives at a time when Folkestone is rapidly evolving: once bypassed by the Channel Tunnel, now a cultural magnet hosting and transforming into one of the UK’s most vibrant coastal destinations. With 70 permanent works and over 1,50,000 visitors expected, Folkestone aligns with global art cities while maintaining local sensibility. The exhibition’s layered approach: archaeological, ecological, and political, reflects urgency and possibility. As one critic describes: “a surreal and thought-provoking gallery, blending satire, sorrow, and surprise” across cliffs, ruins, and intertidal zones.

The Ledge by Bill Woodrow: A modernist architectural composition signifying concerns about rising water levels due to disappearing polar ice caps. | Creative Folkestone

How Lies the Land? becomes more than a theme; it is a provocation. How as a society we regard the soil, the sea, and the stories embedded around us? This edition exemplifies how public art can reshape public spaces as architecture of memory. It leaves you with a renewed sense that the ground beneath may also speak, and those willing to listen see it more deeply.