Pilar Quinteros - 'Janus Fortress: Folkestone' - for Folkestone

This artwork is now located in Payers Park. Information on the original commission is listed below.

On 29 May 2021, artist Pilar Quinteros launched a new outdoor artwork for the town of Folkestone, working with Creative Folkestone and as part of England's Creative Coast.

‘Janus Fortress: Folkestone’ was a new multifaceted work located on the cliff-top overlooking the town. In ancient Roman religion and myth, Janus is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, frames and endings, usually depicted with two faces. Quinteros’s sculpture, which likewise presents two faces — one faced inland and the other gazing at the sea — symbolised the duality of borders: of looking outwards while protecting inwards, a dichotomy that the pandemic has made extremely pronounced.

The large sculpture was made out of a carefully calibrated plaster composite that resembled the chalk cliffs nearby, and its substance was similarly susceptible to weather and to human interaction, which, like the eroding cliff face to disintegrated over time. Quinteros cedes sculptural control to her materials through her work’s built-in fragility and metamorphosis, and in this way her work suggests an acceptance of mortality and of not being able to control life. It is, she says, “a monument to uncertainty”.

Pilar Quinteros - 'Janus Fortress: Folkestone'. Photo credit: Thierry Bal

‘Janus Fortress Folkestone’ was also part of the 2021 Folkestone Triennial, ‘The Plot’, and the work formed part of a procession that ended the exhibition — and closes England’s Creative Coast — at the end of October.

Explaining the ideas behind her work, Quinteros states: “For much of human history it was believed that we lived in a world of binary nature, of opposites. Working for ​Waterfronts ​for England's Creative Coast, and the specific location of Folkestone makes me think of that region of the country and its history being an important border, as a place of simultaneous entries and exits. It is a precise place to think about  supposed opposites and what can be in the middle. Art, I think, opens that possibility.”

Pilar Quinteros’s art is underpinned by an abiding interest in public spaces, the way they function and the diversity of human behaviour within them. She experiments with both structure and material, testing the boundaries, resilience and resistance of fragile and unstable substances and how these transform over time.

Artist biography

Pilar Quinteros was born in 1988, Santiago, where she still lives and works. She has exhibited her work in places such as Kusthaus Pasquart (Biel, Switzerland, 2018); 2017 California-Pacific Triennial – Building as Ever (Newport Beach, California, USA); 32nd São Paulo Biennial – Live Uncertainty (São Paulo, Brazil, 2016); 31st Biennial of Graphic Arts – Over You-You (Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2015); PinchukArtCentre (Kiev, Ukraine, 2014); National Museum of Fine Arts (Santiago, Chile, 2013); Museum of Contemporary Art (Santiago, Chile, 2010). She is also a co-founder of the MICH Collective (International Museum of Chile), a multidisciplinary group dedicated to generating reflective projects, art spaces and artistic creation.

England’s Creative Coast is led by Turner Contemporary and Visit Kent (Go To Places), funded by Arts Council England and Visit England as part of the Cultural Destinations programme and Discover England Fund, with support from the South East Local Enterprise Partnership (SELEP), East Sussex County Council, Kent County Council, Essex County Council, Visit Essex, Southend Borough Council, The Historic Dockyard Chatham and Southeastern.