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Sarah-Joy Ford
Contemporary Artist
A Quilter’s Guide to the Lesbian Archive
A Solo Show at HOME, Granada Foundation Gallery (May-July 2021)
Sarah-Joy Ford presents a new body of work following several years of research in the Lesbian Archive Collection at Glasgow Women’s Library. Sarah-Joy’s work takes pleasure in connecting with this lesbian heritage, acknowledging the complexities of queer archiving, and stitching through to new legacies with this work.
This exhibition is an exercise in taking pleasure in identification, recognition and connection with the lesbian pasts represented in the archive. It provides material space to remember the stories of the dyke lands, lesbian history walks, and lesbian spaces hidden in their vaults. Ford’s work examines what it means to look backward through a largely unknown history; acknowledging failed utopias, and stitching through the complex politics, feelings and affects of the Lesbian Archive. Creating a new legacy for lesbian lives in every thread, whilst acknowledging the vast unknowability of the archive, the complexities of the lives recorded within it, and the limits of visibility as the primary tool for lesbian liberation.
Using quilt as a methodology, Ford has responded to and re-visioned archival material. Each stitch is a mediation between the feelings, sensations, and pleasures of exploring lesbian pasts. This reflection indulges in the images, iconographies and symbols that have been used to invoke lesbian strength, power, and community throughout the 20th and 21st century. These iconographies are woven textile tales from Lesbos, the interlocking Venus, and the labrys to the Amazon woman.
The Lesbian Archive and Information Centre was founded in London 1984 to create a community repository for lesbian history, culture, and memory. As a result of shifting politics, political disagreements, the affects of Section 28 and the loss of funding, it closed in 1994. There is now no dedicated Lesbian Archive in the UK, LIAC’s material is now housed at Glasgow Women’s Library. Taking this into account Ford considers the emotional and political difficulties that eventually fractured and fragmented the archive and considers the complex reality that this exposes.
“Taking care of the past without attempting to fix it means living with bad attachments, identifying through loss, allowing ourselves to be haunted.” (Heather Love, Feeling Backwards: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, 2007)