Sarah-Joy Ford United Kingdom

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Sarah-Joy Ford is an Artist, Post Graduate Researcher and Associate Lecturer at Manchester School of Art. Ford works with textiles to explore the complexities and pleasures of queer communities, histories and archives. Her current practice and research explores quilt making as an affective methodology for making re-visioning lesbian archival material.

Sarah-Joy Ford is an Artist; Post Graduate Researcher and Associate Lecturer at Manchester School of Art. Exhibitions include Banner Culture, British Textile Biennale (Blackburn), Queen, COLLAR (Manchester) and Weaving Europe: The World as Mediation, Shelly Residence (Paphos). Curatorial projects include: The Guild: Contemporary Textiles, Templeworks (Leeds), Cut Cloth: Contemporary Textiles and Feminism, The Portico Library (Manchester) and Hard Craft, Vane Gallery (Newcastle). Public commissions include projects for The Yorkshire Year of the Textile, Processions: a hundred years of suffrage, Beyond the Binary at The Pitt Rivers Museum and Superbia. She is the recipient of an NWDTCP award for her PhD research examining quilting as a methodology for re-visioning British lesbian archive. She is co-director of the Queer Research Network Manchester, an interdisciplinary network connecting postgraduates across the Manchester Universities and a member of the practice based research collective Proximity.

Ford works with textiles to explore the complexities and pleasures of queer communities, histories and archives. Her work embraces the entanglements of digital and traditional, using strategies of quilting, digital embroidery, digital print, applique and embellishment. The practice is deeply rooted in a femme aesthetic that indulges in rich pink hues, satins and dense embroideries - embracing the decorative and the decedent. This work is situated within histories of gendered marginalisation, and the artists who reclaimed cloth as a powerful language for disrupting discrimination, erasure and hetro-patriarchy.

Her current practice and research explores quilt making as an affective methodology for making re-visioning lesbian archival material. The loving attention and protective qualities of the quilt offer a reparative site for investing in lesbian archives inherently bound to a history of injury and marginalisation. Although quilts have traditionally celebrated the milestones of a heteronormative life – birth, marriage, children, death – this project subverts this tradition and proposes the quilt as a space collapsing linear time and encountering the unexpected affects of the lesbian archive.