Folkestone Triennial 2014: Lookout - exhibition review

From a baroque beach hut to a bamboo scaffold, a clutch of curiosities makes Folkestone a giant outdoor gallery — and all only a mind-bending day trip away
Strangely alluring: Gabriel Lester’s bamboo scaffolding
Ben Luke28 August 2014

As part of the third Folkestone Triennial, the lighthouse at the end of the town’s harbour pier holds a message, set in cool blue letters against its white stone. It’s not discernible with the naked eye from most parts of the Kent town but you can view it from a telescope on a viewing platform above the disused railway line leading to it. “Weather is a third to place and time,” it reads.

One of 21 new sculptures and installations dotted around Folkestone for the triennial, it’s a previously unseen piece by the late Ian Hamilton Finlay, concrete poet and artist, a man enamoured of the sea. Out at the end of the pier, it evokes the importance of weather to all sea-farers, a factor as vital as longitude and latitude, and the lighthouse’s role in keeping them safe. But it has a wider meaning, about how weather can affect how we experience the world around us, what we see and feel.

It couldn’t be more apt for the day that I get a preview of the triennial: the coldest August bank holiday on record, and surely one of the wettest. In an otherwise lovely summer, Folkestone must have been thronging at times, but when I visited it was largely deserted. It only emphasises how the town is still in flux, largely a spectre of the bustling resort of the Victorian and Edwardian era, much of it shabby, despite the high-speed rail link and the occasional shiny new building.

To emphasise this, lots of the triennial works can be found in places that are normally wastelands, derelict or empty — sites laden with melancholy. At the former harbour station is Tim Etchells’s neon text, the lettering crisp and white against the decaying walls of both platforms which, like the tracks beneath, are slowly being reclaimed by nature. “Coming and going is why the place is here at all,” the neon reads, referring not just to the tourists but to the millions of soldiers that left here during the First World War and to goods trains that were crucial to its once thriving industries. It’s also about the here and now, and even the future — what does a place become when many of its original functions have disappeared?

Striking: Tim Etchells’s neon text at the old harbour station

Either side of Etchells’s work is destruction and construction. The brutalist concrete pilot house, a tall viewing tower at the far end of the harbour, is being demolished, and though it’s nothing to do with the triennial, its presence on the waterfront is unavoidable. It makes the Dutch artist Gabriel Lester’s bamboo scaffolding, which straddles the defunct railway line as it passes through the old harbour, all the more elegant and alluring.

Based on Lester’s recent experiences in China, where such scaffolding can climb many storeys, it’s a beautiful sculpture in terms of its material, almost like a drawing on the skyline. But as well as creating a satisfying form, Lester has made an emblem for contemporary geopolitics — he sees the bamboo scaffold as evoking the so-called “Chinese Century” we’re now part of, as opposed to the British Century, the 19th, in which Folkestone began to thrive, with the railway at its heart.

Towers, lighthouses and viewing platforms dominate the whole triennial show, which is called Lookout and is curated by Lewis Biggs, former director of Tate Liverpool and artistic director of five Liverpool biennials. There’s a gentle flow of work beginning as soon as you leave the train station: you enter the town under a bridge, transformed into The Luckiest Place on Earth, a work by the Folkestone-based collective Strange Cargo. Four previously unused stone plinths on the bridge’s walls are now occupied by brightly coloured figures, digital 3D scans of Folkestone residents, who each clasp golden talismans — a horseshoe, a four-leafed clover, a cat — and look down at us benevolently. It makes for a neat beginning, turning a humdrum, water-stained bridge into a ceremonial threshold.

Also on the outskirts, Jyll Bradley, who was born in Folkestone, adds a similar sparkle to the wasteland that once housed a gasworks, the place where Folkestone’s electric light was first generated. Here, bright green LED pillars are surrounded by a knitted web which relates to the hop-stringing found in Kentish fields beyond the town. It’s as if we’re being thrust into the future and whisked back to the past at once.

Colourful: Pablo Bronstein’s Beach Hut in the Style of Nicholas Hawksmoor

You experience the triennial very much in 360 degrees, constantly catching sight of works you’ve just seen from different angles or in different lights. From Bradley’s work you see the wind turbine which powers a lift, created by Marjetica Port and architect Ooze, that rises up the viaduct to present views over the harbour. Look the other way and you spot one of the water towers that Diane Dever and Jonathan Wright have erected along the course of the River Pent, hidden beneath Folkestone’s streets. Or you see one of five headless cockerels created by Detroit-based collective Rootoftwo that stand on the top of various buildings throughout the town.

They call these decapitated poultry Withervanes and, rather than moving with the wind, they’re turned around by fear — they are equipped with software allowing them to scan social media and in response to particular search terms and keywords defined by US Homeland Security. An “early worrying system”, as the artists call it.

As a whole the show is light on geopolitics, though Yoko Ono has installed signs simply saying “Earth Peace” on a flag atop the Grand Hotel on the cliffs overlooking the town (whose flagpole clattered insistently amid the bank holiday storms). Amid the current global horror, it feels like a lament rather than an activist slogan. A plaque with the same words set into the lawn near the cliffs looks like a memorial.

There is also plenty of humour. I love Pablo Bronstein’s Beach Hut in the Style of Nicholas Hawksmoor, a mini lighthouse which brilliantly thrusts the dark Baroque spikiness of Hawksmoor amid the pastel cheeriness of the huts around it. And Emma Hart’s occupation of a flat above a shop is a ribald flurry of ceramics, photography and videos that looks at the idea of “being served” in the widest sense. Long pink ceramic arms with sweaty armpits proffering drooping wine glasses on trays illustrated with phallic plants are just the beginning.

Hart’s work is an enjoyable tangent from the main thrust of the show — the “place and time” to which Finlay refers in his text on the lighthouse, and specifically this complex and ramshackle town in the early stages of regeneration. Impressively, it doesn’t gloss over Folkestone’s awkwardness — it welcomes you into it, makes you grapple with it.

Lookout was so absorbing and intelligent that, even after this grimmest of days, I left wanting to come back.

The Folkestone Triennial 2014: Lookout runs from Saturday until November 2 (folkestonetriennial.org.uk, 01303 760740). Admission free

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