A huge steel bell swings on a wire across the seafront and a collection of numbered pebbles lie on the Leas.

They are among the unusual sights which have greeted visitors to Folkestone in recent years, after the Creative Foundation dotted artwork throughout the town to mark its 2008 and 2011 Triennial Festivals.

A total of 16 pieces are still on display, and they have now been officially grouped together as a collection under the title of Folkestone Artworks.

The collection is being launched this weekend, along with a new website, map and audio guide.

To mark the occasion there will be a programme of free guided walks, family activities, children’s tours and workshops.

The collection, which includes Cornelia Parker’s Folkestone Mermaid at Sunny Sands and a series of bronze sculptures by Tracey Emin, is displayed in a range of places across the town and can be enjoyed free of charge, all year round.

It is hoped that Folkestone Artworks will continue to grow after each new Triennial, helping to further develop the town’s reputation as a unique destination for contemporary art.

The Creative Foundation’s Alastair Upton said: “We want to encourage the people to explore, experience and discover this gem of a collection.

“Experiencing this new way of looking at art outside the confines of a gallery encourages different ways of seeing, learning and thinking about contemporary art.

“It’s also fun to explore and to discover places in the town people may not have seen before.”

For information visit www.folkestoneartworks.org.uk.

What is on show in Folkestone?

Tonico LemosAuad (1968, Brazil): ‘Carrancas’ -Folkestone Harbour

Carrancas is inspired by Brazilian boat figureheads, used as symbolic talismans to protect sailors. The various Carrancas attached to the tall wooden poles are revealed and hidden according to the ebb and flow of the tidal waters. Auad has also created a special wallpaper, coated with silver ink. Visitors are encouraged to draw messages and scratch off the silver to reveal images from processions in northern Brazil and of Folkestone’s own Charivari parade.

A K Dolven (1953, Norway): ‘Out of Tune’ - Folkestone Seafront, opposite the Leas Lift

Dolven’s installation features a 16th-century Tenor Bell from Scraptoft Church in Leicestershire, which had been removed for not being in tune with the others. It is suspended from a steel cable strung between two 20m high steel beams, placed 30m apart. The bell can be rung by visitors using a traditional rope bell-pull.

Ruth Ewan (1980, UK): ‘We Could Have Been Anything That We Wanted To Be’ -top of the ZigZag Path, The Leas

On October 5, 1793, the recently formed Republic of France abandoned the Gregorian calendar in favour of an entirely new model, the French Republican Calendar, which became the official calendar of France for 13 years. Each day of the Republican Calendar was made up of 10 hours. Each hour was divided into 100 minutes and each minute into 100 seconds. Inspired by this historical model, Ewan had created new clocks and altered existing ones around town to tell decimal time. To accompany the installation, the artist also produced a booklet that further illuminated the utopian concept of revolutionary time. The only one remaining now is the one found at the top of the ZigZag Path.

Spencer Finch (1962, USA): ‘The Colour of Water’ - Leas Promenade lower path, in front of the Grand Hotel

Finch observed the ever changing tone and colour of the Channel over several weeks throughout 2010. This resulted in a palette of 100 variants of sea colour, which was used to dye 100 flags. Each morning throughout the Triennial, a sea-coloured flag will be chosen and hoisted at midday. Its colour will be determined daily by matching the sea’s with one from Finch’s large colour wheel, installed just below the western end of the main Leas Promenade.

Hamish Fulton (1946, UK): ‘31 Walks From Water to Water 1971-2010’ - wall beside car park, Harbour Approach Road

Kent-based artist Fulton has created a metal sign, mapping the 31 water-related walks across the British Isles and western Europe during his 40-year career. During the 2011 Triennial, Fulton had also produced an A2-sized text poster highlighting the walks made in South East England. Four of the Kent walks were made especially for that year.

Cristina Iglesias (1956, Spain): ‘Towards the Sound of Wilderness’ - Martello 4, The Leas

Iglesias’s architectural intervention on the ramparts of Martello 4 offers the illusion of an entrance into another world. Iglesias’s sculpture allows visitors a chance to view this historic monument for the first time in many years. Visitors negotiate a path cut through shrubs and trees to a mirrored walk-in structure clad with resin foliage. A window at the end of this passageway opens up a view of the overgrown tower and moat with its extraordinary wildlife.

Cornelia Parker (1956, UK): ‘The Folkestone Mermaid’ - overlooking Sunny Sands, The Stade

Parker has created a Folkestone version of one of the most popular tourist attractions in the world, Copenhagen’s ‘Little Mermaid’. All women of Folkestone were offered the opportunity to model for the mermaid, and Parker chose Georgina Baker, mother-of-two and Folkestone born and bred. Unlike the idealised Copenhagen version, this is a lifesize, life-cast sculpture, celebrating the local and the everyday.

Paloma Varga Weisz (1966, Germany): ‘Rug People’ - Former Harbour Railway Station

Varga Weisz’s five-headed sculpture, its body wrapped in blankets and cardboard, appears stranded and forelorn. Arrived as if by magic, the group huddles together on a carpet, which covers the disused railway tracks of the old harbour station.This station, with its history of bringing First World War soldiers to the harbour to embark to France, as well as being the terminus for the Orient-Express until 2008, provided the major inspiration for Varga Weisz’s work.

Adam Chodzko (1965, UK): ‘Pyramid’ Sign - Coastal Park below the Leas Cliff Hall

In a number of film, slide and photographic works Chodzko has invented fictitious scenarios, set in a not-too-distant future, that blend the familiar with the strange. Through fantasy, wonder and make-believe, they are aimed at making visitors re-consider their sense of place and community.

Patrick Tuttofuoco (1974, Italy): ‘Folkestone’ - Harbour arm

The Orient-Express used to pull in weekly at Folkestone. Tuttofuoco and two of his collaborators re-enacted the classic journey from Istanbul to Paris and Folkestone, resulting in FOLKESTONE, his large sculpture on the harbour arm. The individual ‘letters’ were chanced upon by the artist through social situations and incidents with people along the route.

Nathan Coley (1967, UK): ‘Heaven is a Place Where Nothing Ever Happens’48 Tontine Street

British seaside towns are often associated with retirement and the idea of a last resort. The melancholy of these locations is touched upon by Coley’s illuminated text sculpture, Heaven Is A Place Where Nothing Ever Happens, seen against the sky in Tontine Street. While formally suggesting the expectation of excitement, the work is redolent of seaside towns’ sense of ennui. At once elegant and tacky, the use of white electric lightbulbs evokes 1970s disco glamour as well as fairground aesthetics.

Mark Wallinger (1959, UK): ‘Folk Stones’ - West End of The Leas

It first appears like an almost banal numbering exercise, a “significant yet pointless act” as Wallinger puts it. Yet the precise number of beach pebbles collected and laid out into a massive square reveals a profound underpinning: 19,240 individually numbered stones stand for the exact number of British soldiers killed on July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme. The work is inspired by the millions of soldiers who left from Folkestone harbour to fight on the battlefields of France and Flanders.

Pae White (1963, USA): ‘Barking Rocks’ - Pleydell Gardens

Having observed pensioners unable to walk far and stranded on benches, their dogs listless or straining at the lead, White designed her Barking Rocks park especially for the needs of both: now the elderly can rest and chat or picnic while their dogs exercise and play. The site itself, sandwiched between the main shopping street and the Leas promenade, had long been neglected and is now transformed into what the artist calls “landscape theatre”. Sculptures of cats’ heads ominously stuck on nine-foot-high poles are a dramatic (if tongue in cheek) warning to those not invited here.

Richard Wilson (1953, UK): ‘18 Holes’ Coastal Promenade - below the Leas Cliff Hall at sea level

Folkestone’s former Rotunda Amusement Park is the inspiration for 18 Holes. The dysfunctional and long overgrown crazy golf course was the only remnant of the otherwise erased park. Wilson’s herculean project of cutting, lifting, restoring and reassembling the 18 weighty concrete slabs is a tribute to the memory of this former popular tourist attraction. Wilson’s three ‘crazy’ beach huts are installed only a few hundred metres away from their original site and alongside the existing rather bunker-like Folkestonian beach huts.

Tracey Emin (1963, UK): ‘Baby Things’ - seven different sites around the town

Baby Things, Emin’s perfect bronze recreation of baby clothes, can be found tucked underneath benches, hanging from railings and lying by the kerb. Exuding an aura of the forlorn and dejected, they are poignant reminders ofFolkestone’s high teenage pregnancy rate, which is similar to that of Margate, Emin’s home town.

Richard Wentworth (1947, Samoa) ‘Racinated’ - 10 different sites around the town

This 10-part deep-blue enamel sign piece is spread across Folkestone’s promenades, alleyways and avenues. It highlights the provenance of some of Britain’s non-native trees, and also alluded to the many migrants who have disembarked in Folkestone to make their homes here or elsewhere in the country