Audio Described Tour: Afterlife

Join us for an audio-described tour of our new exhibition, Afterlife, led by artist Juliana Capes and specifically designed for visually impaired visitors. Juliana will introduce and explore the exhibition through rich and detailed description.

The tour will also touch on our newly opened Time + Space exhibition, There Is No Beginning, As There Is No End by Richard Maguire.

About Afterlife

Afterlife brings together nearly 200 amulets in a sculptural installation designed in collaboration with Berlin-based architects, Zeller and Moye. Amulets are miniature talismanic objects, typically carved in stone. Appearing across millennia and cultures, they are small enough to be held in the hand or worn, and are generally considered protective.

Afterlife reimagines this tradition. Working with museums around the world, Paterson has recreated amulets civilisations across the globe (including Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Viking, Islamic, Japanese, Indian, Chinese, Celtic, Greco-Roman and Pre-Columbian), using materials sourced from endangered landscapes and fragile ecosystems, to serve as a bridge between past and present.

The materials used to recreate the amulets reflect the pressing environmental issues of our time. Rocks from glacial terrains left bare by retreating ice, coral from the Great Barrier Reef, stones from islands facing rising sea levels, and other materials from devastated or threatened ecosystems are transformed into tiny objects of reflection, connection and renewal. Each chosen material carries a story of environmental fragility, symbolising urgent issues such as biodiversity loss, deforestation, and the impact of climate change.

Installed in a distinctive circular table crafted from sycamore by local makers Silvan, Afterlife explores themes of deep time, geology, and the environment. Drawing on centuries of cultural and spiritual traditions to reflect the fragility of the natural world today, Afterlife prompts us to consider the legacies we leave for future generations.

Afterlife was commissioned by Creative Folkestone for Folkestone Triennial 2025, with additional support from The Shifting Foundation, Collective Edinburgh and Goethe Institut Glasgow. Exhibition Design by Zeller & Moye.

About There Is No Beginning, As There Is No End

Through the lens of (homo)sexuality, There Is No Beginning, As There Is No End highlights how ideas about sexual practice have been used as too ls of oppression. Maguire references spectacles of sexual “degeneracy” in the Indian Subcontinent, which were instrumentalised by colonial powers to justify brutality.

Barbed wire and link fencing feature throughout Maguire’s highly skilled drawings – these motifs deriving from the control, surveillance, and policing of minority groups and itinerant communities in the wake of British colonialism in India. Working also from archival photographs, Islamic painted miniatures, and Hindu statues, Maguire’s drawings acknowledge the ways that material and cultural production illustrate the workings of colonial oppression.

The exhibition’s sculptural works reference the few surviving representations of same sex acts from Hindu temple statuary, many of which were destroyed in efforts to obscure the acceptance of sexuality across religions. Maguire also references the photographic oeuvre of photographer Lionel Wendt, one of the few Sri Lankan artists of his time to produce art featuring homoerotic imagery.