I am on a deserted Folkestone railway platform, squeezed on to a bench with the Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller, the French photographer Gautier Deblonde and a clown, eating fish and chips in a gale. This is what it takes, it seems, to make a public artwork.

Next month is the first Folkestone Triennial, an art festival intended to reinvigorate the once-proud resort. The curator Andrea Schlieker has assembled a starry roster of 23 artists including Deller, Tracey Emin, Mark Wallinger and Tacita Dean, each of whom will create a public artwork, with some remaining permanently.

I tagged along with four of the artists to discover how such a project gets off the ground.

Mark Wallinger, Folk Stones

“It’s perfect,” says Mark Wallinger, standing on an unassuming patch of grass on Folkestone’s promenade and beaming at the wind-weathered turf. It doesn’t look very exciting to me, but Wallinger is quite taken with it. This is the spot chosen for hispiece Folk Stones – 19,240 individually numbered Folkestone beach pebbles embedded in nine square metres of concrete. This is the number of British soldiers who died on July 1, 1916, the first day of the battle of the Somme. On a still day you could hear the battle from Folkestone.

The piece is necessarily a memorial, but it’s also about the act of remembering and fathoming a loss, especially on that scale. While Wallinger is striding up and down the grass, marking out his square with jumpers, a hoody-clad man with an enormous beer belly passes us, walking a dainty chihuahua on a bright pink lead. Perhaps Folkestone is ready for this after all.

The artist is still not exactly clear on how 19,240 pebbles are going to be embedded by hand in this vast swath of concrete, but his building company seems confident. The numbers have been painted on by a machine that mimics Wallinger’s handwriting. He admits that perhaps it’s a more personal piece than he first thought. “It’s both a memorial and a despairing acknowledgement of the inadequacy of any memorial. As you grow older and you lose a parent it comes as quite a shock to realise, oh right, they only exist in my head. I lost my father. Perhaps that’s got something to do with it.”

Jeremy Deller, Risk Assessment

We’re huddled in a freezing church hall watching people fall over their own feet. Our clown, Mitch Mitchelson – head of performance at the Circus Space in London – is trying to teach the basics of farce to a group of local amateur dramatics enthusiasts, while Deller looks on.

His performance piece is based around small slapstick routines, which will be performed around Folkestone by locals. “They will be comedic interventions that will hopefully be an almost invisible addition to the daily workings of Folkestone,” the brochure says. They have got a way to go before they are invisible, but comedic is right. The performers walk around the room, tripping themselves up, knocking off their own hats, grappling fruitlessly with deck-chairs. Tiny moments, but charming and very funny.

We meet again in London and Deller is happy with his troupe after the final workshop. “We had a good chat, and some of them still hadn’t realised why they were doing it, so I went into a long explanation about comedy being an art.

Laurel and Hardy and Buster Keaton – they’re artists. Also about the influence of black-and-white comedy films, the Marx Brothers and so on, on performance artists – people like Vito Aconchi in New York in the early Seventies, and about classical sculpture, the shapes of arrested figures.”

Richard Wilson, 18 Holes

The last few months have been a trial for Richard Wilson. First, the building he was going to use for his Folkestone commission was suddenly demolished. Then, when he finally decided on a piece, all the structural engineers he approached told him it couldn’t be done. Wilson’s latest plan is to cut out 18 huge slabs of concrete from Folkestone’s tatty, unused crazy golf course, each containing one of its holes. These will then be manoeuvred to the promenade to form the walls and roofs of three beach huts. It’s a witty metaphor for what’s happening to the town – taking the old and dingy, and making it into the new. It’s also an engineering nightmare, but he does it.

It’s obvious, seeing Wilson happily tramping around his windswept site in filthy blue overalls and work boots, that he loves getting his hands dirty. We wander down to the site where the piece will be erected. Nearby stands a row of four yellow-painted, slightly forbidding huts with padlocked doors. Deblonde, our urbane French photographer, is baffled. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” Wilson indicates the low wall in front, with pointed stones placed upright at regular intervals in the top layer of mortar. “It’s so English,” he says, “you don’t want anyone sitting on your front wall, so you put the stones in, but leave enough room between them to put your cup of tea.”

Langlands & Bell, Folkestone: Boulogne a Blind Date

The smell is all-pervading at Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell’s filming session at a table tennis tournament in an airless school gym in Canterbury. Transported into a realm of damp socks and excuse notes, I wonder how this knockabout between Folkestone’s finest ping-pong players is going to fit in to their film piece, to be shown in the town’s Coastwatch station.

Folkestone: Boulogne is being shot in and around Folkestone and its twin town in France. The ferry route between the two towns was halted after the opening of the Channel Tunnel, which damaged both economies. The artists have collected hours of footage from both towns, including a folk festival in Boulogne, the creaky hydraulic lift that ferries people down to Folkestone’s beach, a French hip-hop group who rap about fishing, and the only pilot boat that patrols the channel between the ports.

“We were drinking in a pub in Kent and there was this parrot in a cage,” Langlands recalls. “We were told that it belonged to the father of one of the barmaids; he was in hospital and it swore so much that his wife wouldn’t have it in the house.” Intrigued by this mysterious figure, the artists met up with a recovered Captain Reynolds and were invited on to his salvage tug to film. “We asked if we needed anything – passports, whatever – and he said, ‘No, I’m on very good terms with the French.’ ”

Folkstone Triennial runs from June 14 to Sept 14 (www.folkestonetriennial.org.uk 01303 245799)

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