About

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 practice sits at intersection of digital and traditional: using strategies of quilting, digital embroidery, digital print, applique and hand embellishment.

The work claims a femme aesthetic, indulging in shades of pinks, pastel hues, satins, sequins and decadent surface embellishment. Working with decorative textiles situates the practice within histories of gendered marginalisation, and a lineage of artists reclaiming cloth as a powerful  language for disrupting discrimination, erasure and hetro-patriarchy.

Her PhD 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.