Will Thorburn and George Chapman present Funhouse, an exhibition of paintings and drawings, as part of Folkestone Fringe and coinciding with Folkestone Triennial. The colour-driven works explore the artists' local environments and their emotional and social history.
Will Thorburn is a Folkestone-based artist, whose work is influenced by the various coastal towns he has lived in. Growing up in Whitehaven, a port in Cumbria, he subsequently lived in Clacton-on-Sea and Brighton before moving to Kent, and uses imagery from arcades, shops, and local architecture of these coastal towns to create his intensely coloured, energetic works. A graduate of Central St Martins' MA Fine Art, he is interested in the aesthetics of candy-floss, fairground rides, palm trees and sunshine: "Folkestone is an incredible place, and I get a lot of my visual material walking around taking photos of the town. I love the sights and sounds of British coastal towns and try to capture that sense of energy and excitement in my artworks."
George Chapman's work explores urban spaces, particularly images of urban decay or places which are unused; he is interested in how these locations tell a history of a city's development and can evoke memory and nostalgia. He strips images down to make ambiguous works using both abstraction and figuration, attempting to document the ephemeral, transitional nature of cities. Born in Cape Town, South Africa, he has exhibited in the UK and internationally and recently completed the Turps Art School programme.
