How Lies the Land?

Folkestone Triennial is one of the UK’s leading exhibitions of contemporary art in public space. Every three years, artists from around the world are invited to make new work that responds to the town – its coastal landscapes, its stories and the people who live here.

From 19 July to 19 October 2025, the Triennial returned for its sixth edition with How Lies the Land? In 2025, 18 artists from more than 15 countries created artworks exploring the ground beneath our feet – from its deep histories to the futures it holds.

Art has appeared in unexpected places across Folkestone, including old railway lines, empty buildings, coastal paths and everyday public spaces. Visitors can explore large-scale sculptures, sound installations, digital works and community collaborations that offer new ways of seeing the town – and the world – around us.

Whether you’re an art lover or just curious, How Lies the Land? is an open invitation to walk, listen, imagine and connect.

Folkestone Triennial 2025: How Lies the Land?

We are all shaped by and in turn shape the landscapes we inhabit – personally, socially, geopolitically. How Lies the Land? asked us to think with the ground beneath our feet, to connect with the memories it holds and the futures it can imagine.

Human connection to the land is baked into the name Folkestone, attested as early as the seventh century. Viewed through the lens of deep time, the land on which Folkestone now sits has been through multiple transformations – fossils found under the town centre speak to a time before the creation of the channel which separated Britain and Folkestone from the European continent, while recent landslips remind us that the shape and form of the landscape is still not set in stone. 

For archaeologists and geologists, time unfolds not horizontally, in a succession of events one after the other, but vertically: each layer formed on top of, or even out of, what has gone before, and stretching into the far future as much as the deep past.

How Lies the Land? invited artists to respond to the layers and contours of Folkestone, finding in the deep ground an imaginative space to explore themes including migration and climate change, creation of community, interdependency of species, and the ancestral memories as well as future possibilities contained within the land.

From large-scale installations to immersive soundscapes, collaborations with local communities, and new digital worlds, artists have responded to the specific local context and history of this significant coastal town to reflect on questions which affect us the world over.

Folkestone Triennial 2025 was curated by Sorcha Carey

Sorcha Carey is Director of Collective, a free contemporary art centre in Edinburgh. For twenty years, she has specialised in the commissioning of new work, with a particular interest in working with artists to develop sited projects for a range of public spaces and contexts.

As Director of Edinburgh Art Festival (2011–2021 editions), she curated the festival’s annual commissions programme, each year inviting international and UK artists to develop new projects for the city. She also initiated Platform, a dedicated opportunity for early career artists to make and present new work.

Between 2003 and 2008, she worked on three editions of the Liverpool Biennial, including leading a series of site-specific commissions for Liverpool’s 2008 Capital of Culture Programme.

Céline Condorelli
Céline Condorelli makes art that explores how we relate to each other through space, colour and structure. Her work often blurs the line between sculpture, architecture and design, inviting people to pause, reflect or simply sit.

Cooking Sections
Artists Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe form Cooking Sections, using food as a lens to explore climate, economy and ecology. Their work ranges from immersive installations to long-term research on how we can eat in times of environmental change.

Dineo Seshee Raisibe Bopape
Dineo Seshee Raisibe Bopape creates sensory, layered installations using soil, clay, sound and light. Her work speaks to memory, land and the spiritual histories embedded in place.

Dorothy Cross
Dorothy Cross is an Irish artist whose poetic, often surreal works reflect on nature, transformation and the passage of time. She works across sculpture, photography and video, frequently using unexpected materials like cowhide, jellyfish or bronze.

Emeka Ogboh
Emeka Ogboh works with sound, smell and taste to explore ideas of belonging and identity. His installations immerse audiences in the emotional textures of place, migration and memory.

Emilija Škarnulytė
Emilija Škarnulytė is a filmmaker and installation artist whose work drifts between science and fiction. She leads us through nuclear ruins, underwater cities and deep time, reflecting on the unseen systems that shape our world.

Hanna Tuulikki
Hanna Tuulikki draws from folklore, music and the natural world to explore how we relate to the landscapes we live in. Her performances and films often feature voice, costume and movement as tools for reimagining connection.

J Maizlish Mole
J Maizlish Mole maps places through walking, drawing and storytelling. His large-scale hand-drawn maps and murals combine geographic precision with personal experience, creating strange and poetic cartographies.

Jennifer Tee
Jennifer Tee creates installations that reflect on identity, ritual and cultural hybridity. Using materials such as tulip petals, textiles and ceramics, she makes quietly powerful works about movement and transformation.

john gerrard
john gerrard builds slow, meditative digital artworks using real-time graphics. His virtual landscapes, which look like films, often reveal the hidden costs of energy, industry and climate breakdown.

Katie Paterson
Katie Paterson collaborates with scientists to create artworks that explore deep time and the vastness of the cosmos. Her projects are imaginative and precise – mapping dead stars, sending meteorites into orbit, and distilling moonlight into a single lightbulb.

Laure Prouvost
Laure Prouvost spins surreal, funny and often tender stories through film, sculpture and installation. Her immersive worlds invite us to lose our way in language, family history and wild flights of imagination.

Monster Chetwynd
Monster Chetwynd brings joy, play and performance into unexpected places. Known for her handmade costumes, theatrical sets and collective energy, she creates experiences that are both irreverent and generous.

Prabhakar Pachpute
Prabhakar Pachpute uses charcoal, sculpture and animation to explore the impact of mining on land and labour. Drawing on his own family history, his work connects local experience with global systems of extraction.

Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊
Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊 conjures strange and playful worlds rooted in mythology, identity and the immigrant experience. Song's installations and performances mix costume, drawing and storytelling in bold and unexpected ways.

Rubiane Maia
Rubiane Maia is a Brazilian artist based in Folkestone whose work explores the relationship between body, memory and nature. Working with performance, writing and natural materials, she invites a slower, more attentive way of being.

Sara Trillo
Sara Trillo is an East Kent-based artist whose work is shaped by walking and research. She uses materials like clay, chalk and wool to unearth forgotten stories embedded in the local landscape.

Sarah Wood
Sarah Wood works with archive footage, sound and text to reflect on how we tell stories about the past. Her thoughtful, quietly political films explore memory, migration and the shifting nature of truth.