Lets Go Outside: A Letter to Folkestone

“A Letter to Folkestone” describes my encounters with temporary and permanent public artworks in the town, which lays claim to being the UK’s largest permanent collection of outdoor contemporary art.  As Editor Amy Speirs writes “Collie’s first-person account of art and place thoughtfully reflects on whether a place is special in spite of—or because of—its public art. She also provides incisive ruminations on the speculative nature of the town’s artworks that produce competing outlooks for Folkestone: both imagining other poetic, community-activating and hopeful futures while also working to attract property speculators to a town experiencing decline and deprivation—developing prospects that exclude poorer residents from the town’s changing fortunes.”

Read “A Letter to Folkestone”

More about the Lets Go Outside Reader

What do we want and need from our public spaces? As the world emerges from the profound limitations imposed by the COVID-19 crisis, this reader offers a range of possibilities from the domain of art.

With contributions from twenty-five leading Australian and international artists, writers and curators including Cuban artist and activist Tania Bruguera, Indonesian artist collective ruangrupa, British art historian and critic Claire Bishop and Gunditjmara artist and senior knowledge custodian Vicki Couzens, Let’s Go Outside: Art in Public is a timely examination of creative practices in the public realm. From negotiating space in the settler–colonial context of Australia to responding to crises in the United States, Hong Kong and Aotearoa/New Zealand, the reader’s essays, case studies, interviews and visual contributions reveal how ideas and practices associated with remembrance, public history, urban regeneration, communality, accessibility and activism are challenging and innovating art in the public domain.

Let’s Go Outside takes up questions from the successful 2019 symposium Let’s Go Outside: Making Art Public, presented by Monash University Museum of Art and Monash Art Projects (MAP), and reflects on the growing interest in making and presenting art outside of conventional gallery contexts.

With a foreward by Charlotte Day and Callum Morton, and an introduction by Amy Spiers, book contributors include Michelle Antoinette, Alison Atkinson-Phillips, Claire Bishop, Daniel Browning, Tania Bruguera, Danny Butt, Clara Cheung, Madeleine Collie, Emily Cormack, Vicki Couzens, Sean Dockray, Mel Dodd, Felicity Fenner, Blair French, Brian Fuata, Mish Grigor, Oscar Ho Hing-kay, Jonathan Jones, Callum McGrath, Grace McQuilten, Carmen Papalia, Nikos Papastergiadis, Sam Petersen, ruangrupa and Zara Stanhope.