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Triennial is one big art gallery

Tracey Emin piece on The Bayle
Tracey Emin piece on The Bayle

Visitors have been flocking to the first Folkestone Triennial festival of contemporary art.

Chris Denham looks at some of the works on show for the next three months.

Tracey Emin’s work is spread across the town.

Called Baby Things, it is made up of baby clothes cast in bronze but painted to look like the real thing.

Inspired by the high rate of teenage pregancies in the south east, they are robust but seem strangely fragile and quite sad.

Mark Dion’s Mobile Gull Appreciation Unit has been a popular selling point for the Triennial since becoming one of the first works to be previewed earlier this year.

In the shape of what appears to be a giant herring gull the fibreglass work was inspired by Dion’s childhood in Massachusetts, USA, where the gulls were ever-present.

He says: “The unit and its accompanying publications are mandated to advocate an affection for gulls beyond merely their inherent beauty and remarkable ability.”

He has obviously never been woken up by them on his roof.

Sejla Kameric’s work, I Remember I Forgot, consists of various black and white photographs of Folkestone landmarks, some gone, some still living.

Inevitably, the sense of the town’s decline is strong, but so is the sense of history and hope, especially with the heavenly light shining down the picture of the Road of Remembrance.

Nils Norman, with Gavin Wade mit Simon and Tom Bloor, created a temporary modernist kiosk on the Leas.

Built from fibreglass but looking like concrete, the kiosk sells kites complete with the kind of slogans often trumpeted by regeneration developers.

Richard Wilson’s beach huts near the Coastal Park are constructed from the former mini-golf course in Folkestone.

Going under the title 18 holes, it took much of the course to built the three huts and they stand both as a pointer to the future and a reminder of the past.

David Batchelor’s Disco Mecanique is an eye-catching collection of brightly-coloured sunglasses (more than 3,400 pairs) gently spinning like disco balls at the Metropole Gallery.

It is the penultimate show at the gallery before it shuts later this year.

Batchelor's work is often associated with bright, vivid colours, and Disco Mecanique turns the former ballroom into a colourful, dancing spectacle of spectacles.

Mark Wallinger won the Turner Prize in 2007. His Folk Stones will remain in Folkestone permanently, with its 19,240 stones staying on the Leas.

Each numbered pebble represents an Allied life lost on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in the First World War. The battle could be heard from the Leas and many of the soldiers embarked on their journey to death from Folkestone.

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