Mutant seabirds, sewer secrets and a lick of art ice-cream: Folkestone Triennial review

Various venues 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 reliefFolkestone 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.There’s nothing like an exhibit on the scale of Britain’s water pollution to kick off a day at the seaside. It’s cloudy when I visit, the cliffs and sea swathed in white mist and the water under the Arm looking like a detergent soup. It all adds to the uncanny mood. And art doesn’t come much more uncanny than the sculpture by Dorothy Cross near the far end of the Arm. You have to go down soaking wet, concrete steps to a recess with a precipitous opening to the evil-looking sea. “Try not to fall in,” says the attendant, who stays up above. Here you find a massive block of blood-coloured marble, as if a giant tuna steak had been stashed here by fish smugglers. The sides are smooth, the top uneven and rough. Out of this earthy hulk Cross has carved several pairs of feet in hyperrealistic detail, nervously walking its beach-like surface. They face out to sea, as if about to make a bold leap into the blue-green water, to find a better life. Continue reading...

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