About

Dr Sarah-Joy Ford is a Todmorden based artist and independent scholar working with quilting to explore the complexities and pleasures of queer communities, histories and archives. This practice sits at intersection of digital and traditional: using strategies of quilting, digital embroidery, digital print and hand embellishment. Her quilts draw on the materially driven power of textiles to facilitate deep emotional and pleasure responses rooted in its ubiquity, its ability to access our everyday memories, of soft blankets, mothers’ skirts and the feel of cloth against skin. A deep material investment in surface pattern design, and embellishment is part of a femme-ethical methodology that prioritises softness, emotionality, and aesthetic preoccupation.

Ford holds a Curatorial Research Fellowship grant from The Paul Mellon Center, and a Visiting Research Fellowship at The University of Leeds, jointly held with Rachael Field. She was the recipient of an NWDTCP award for her PhD research examining quilting as an affective methodology for re-visioning British lesbian archive, at Manchester School of Art. This research examined how 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.

Her artistic work is represented by Cassinelli Mills.