The ghosts of Portland Fair are to be evoked as the island’s b-side festival returns this September.
The annual celebration of creativity is this year looking to embrace the island’s oddness, and otherness under the title of That Other Place.
Eleven artists have been commissioned to conjure up a parallel Portland, familiar but off kilter, where the fair’s ghost can be heard, felt, and walked through. The work runs across public spaces throughout the Underhill area, free and open to all, from September 9 to 13.
For more than 200 years, every November 5 Chiswell filled with rides, music, and all the suspended unreality of a travelling show. Portland Fair ended in 2001. The island has felt its absence since.
How 11 artists will bring Portland Fair back to life
Buried Giants (Tim Powell and Hannah Price) bring back the fair through sound. Echoes of Portland Fair uses binaural audio technology to place visitors inside three dimensional soundscapes – the ghost train, the Ferris wheel, snatches of conversation, accessed via smartphone and headphones.
Gavin Morris provides a digital funfair in Light Hearted: a giant LED heart, 2.4 metres wide, that only illuminates when two or more people hold hands to complete a circuit. It’s a fairground trick updated for the present, a piece that quite literally shows what connection looks like.
Dawn Parsonage and Peter Hudson (Light Space Color) work with local people and festival goers to create And So Our Shadows Dance – a series of shadow projections cast across Portland’s buildings at dusk, built from workshop-made cut-outs inspired by the fair’s archive and the memories of those who attended it. The shadows spin, dance, and tell stories the Portland Fair left behind.
Deborah Bowness, who showed at b-side 2024, returns with Walls Are Talking – a paper trail of trompe l’oeil paste-ups through Underhill, beginning at Fair Field and winding down through Chiswell. Optical illusions, archive imagery, and reimagined fair ephemera bend the streets into a walking journey through a Portland that might have been.
Helen Grant builds Plucky Dip: a working scale model of a Scotch derrick crane – the kind once used across Portland’s quarries – repurposed as a fairground grabber over a ball pit full of handmade lucky charms. It’s absurdist, participatory, and centred on the island’s industrial past.
Chloe Mantripp, with collaborators Mike McCallum and Ruby LeStrange, leads a guided ramble through Portland’s landscape with three otherworldly performer-musicians: the Mer-Chicken, the White Hare, and the White Stag/Black Rider. The walk ends at a campfire, a storytelling, and hot chocolate, drawn from local folklore of which on Portland there are masses.
Carlos Cortes proposes Ball Run Palace, a community built, ever growing ball run that follows the contours of Portland’s landscape, echoing the old Merchant’s Railway that carried quarried stone down to Castletown. Participants are builders as much as players, assembling and decorating as they go.
Alexi Marshall will run Peculiar Arcana – two linocut tarot card workshops, one with young people designing cards about Portland’s futures, one with elders creating cards drawn from memory.
Ella Yolande will create a large textile archway – quilted with dried plants foraged from Portland itself – through which visitors can pass. A portal, a threshold, an invitation to imagine what lies just on the other side.
Jane C Fox will collaborate with an animator to project hybrid figures from her Encyclopaedia Project onto Portland’s streets and opes, creatures from a world where species coexist without hierarchy, arriving at the Portland Fair as its welcoming committee.
Paul Le Keux, a Portland resident, curates Portland Parables: a live audio-visual evening in which islanders share stories including fact, fiction, memory, dialect, song, without being required to declare which is which. History, myth, and imagination sit side by side, and the audience is left to find the truth.
The other strand of b-side 2026 will see four artists in year-long residence on the island, exploring and sharing all they learn about Portland.
Director Rocca Holly-Nambi said: “That Other Place is about taking all of the otherness from this island and showing how they come together in this cacophony of colour, personality, and open-ness, a bold, living exploration of place. There’s something extraordinary in the meeting of artists, communities, and landscape here that you can’t find anywhere else.”
From our Portland archive:
Incinerator on track for 2030: A massive waste incinerator on Portland is ‘on track’ to start operating by 2030. Powerfuel Portland says contracts to enable the operation are ‘well advanced’. However Dorset Council still opposes the incinerator.