Sarah-Joy Ford

2023

This quilt was originally commissioned for A Tall Order! exhibition curated by Derek Horton and Alice Correia (until May 2023). The exhibition looks back at the 1980s (and early 1990s) of curation at Touchstones that platformed women, black, queer and working class artists led by exhibition officer Jill Morgan.

The quilt was created in response to archival research Rachael Field’s 1991 groundbreaking solo show Real Lemon: Broadening Out; through both archival research and conversations with Rachael. Jill Morgan said of the exhibition in the catalogue “I hope that this exhibition at Rochdale will form a significant part of the feminist re-shaping of art history in the 1990s” (1991).

The quilted artwork is a direct reference to Rachael’s own painting Domestic Scene Whalley Range, offering an intergenerational mirroring of an intimate, lesbian domestic scene. Rachael depicted herself and her partner at the time at their home, in Whalley Range – my re-visioning offers a me keeping my partner Talin Aghanian company in the bathroom while she brushing her teeth at our home in Chorlton. Our guinea pig Baby sits in my lap.

In the original installation, the quilt double sided quilt was hung above a bath belonging to Rochdale industrialist John Bright and to the side a black fossil table containing archive materials. The quilt is an act of intergenerational solidarity and artistic intimacy, and became the beginning of a wonderful friendship. It is a celebration of the lesbian every day, and an insistence on the radical potentiality of sapphic joy.

2023

A commision for The Whitworth exhibition (Un) Defining Queer; created in conversation with the Queering the Whitworth constituant group.

On display until 3rd December 2023.

A commissioned quilt for Islington Mill commemorating those who lost their lives in the 1824 mill collapse.

On 13 October 1824, “a dreadful accident” occurred when the first incarnation of the Islington Mill factory building partially collapsed, less than one year after its construction. Of the 200 workers employed there, 18 were killed when a faulty beam gave way on the fifth floor causing the ceiling to cave in and subsequent floors underneath to give way. Half of the victims were aged 18 or under – the youngest only 10 years old – and 15 were women and girls. It was described at the time as “a day of horrors never to be forgotten in the neighbourhood.”

Looking for Lesbians presents a map of my specific encounter with the ONE Archives collection and traces my interactions with the archive and beyond. It chronicles some of the archival material, places, and people I have encountered, and the conversations I had during my artist-in-residency. The map is in conversation with the archival materials on display in the vitrine—my attempt to untangle and re-tangle some of the threads of lesbian history and activism that weave through the collections at ONE. Interwoven with the pulp collection, the map traces the lesbians in Los Angeles who were looking for lesbian literature, and, through this search, created their own literary culture, including writing groups, feminist presses, magazines, newspapers, listings, and published novels and poetry. It highlights some of the significant collections held at ONE Archives, including Clothespin Fever Press (1985-1986), which was a lesbian feminist publishing company run by Carolyn Weathers and the artist Jenny Wrenn. Wrenn additionally published Lesbian Line newspaper, which acted as a catalogue for Clothespin Fever and as a national newsletter and finding aid for lesbian publishing across the USA. The map is in no way comprehensive or representative of lesbian literary activism in Los Angeles. It is only a snapshot--my visualization of my time with the archive and some of the lesbians of Los Angeles. It is an acknowledgement of the deep pleasure that finding lesbian connections can bring, and a reminder of the joy of finding lesbian community.

Hand-made paper from recycling from ONE Archives, pen

2022

ONE Archives at the USC Libraries contains not only a collection of lesbian pulp novels, but also the traces and records of the ways in which lesbians in Los Angles searched for, shared, categorized, and created their own lesbian literature. In 1966, Barbara Grier began to write her book review column titled “Lesbiana” for the lesbian magazine The Ladder, published by the Los Angeles chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis. Grier went on to compile three editions of Lesbians in Literature: A Bibliography, that included detailed lists of books with lesbian themes categorized by her very own rating system:

A: indicates major Lesbian characters and/or action

B: indicates minor Lesbian characters and/or action

C: indicates latent, repressed Lesbianism or characters who can be so interpreted

T: stands for Trash

Additional asterisks indicated the quality and quantity of lesbian content. This artwork combines the title of the book with Grier’s rating system in order to collate, present, and categorize the entire collection of lesbian pulp fiction at the ONE Archives. The format of the cards references Grier’s own call for suggestions of books for her to include, indicating the exact order of details to be written on a 3” x 5” card. In some ways, the grid mimics browsing the shelves of a library, but, by providing additional information and drawings, it helps anyone seeking a lesbian novel for reading or to simply enjoy the diversity of titles and their ratings .

Sarah-Joy Ford & Alexis Bard Johnson

2022

Created for the ONE Archives, USC as part of the Looking for Lesbians Residency.

Beloved: Crafting Intimacies with the Ladies of Llangollen

This work is part of a larger set of site specific interventions at Plas Newydd Historic House and Gardens. These textile artworks were created as posthumous gifts for the Ladies of Llangollen - a radical re-design of the heritage house bedroom - situating the bed as a site for radical intimacy.

Photography by Ben Harrison Meek.

More about the Exhibition:

This exhibition presents a site-specific installation of quilted and textile artworks created by Manchester-based artist Sarah-Joy Ford after a period of artist residency at Plas Newydd Historic House and Gardens in Llangollen. The embroidered intervention is inspired by the deep and lifelong intimate relationship between the Ladies of Llangollen and the extraordinary home that they created together.

Plas Newydd was home to Lady Eleanor Butler (1739–1829) and Sarah Ponsonby (1755–1831), who captured the imagination of Regency society when they eloped from their families in Ireland to begin a life of exquisite retirement together, escaping the confines of their gendered fates of marriage and the convent. After a tour of Wales, – they chose to settle on the outskirts of Llangollen, in the small cottage they christened Plas Newydd in 1780. Here they lived together as life partners, with their maid and friend Mary Caryl who helped them escape from Ireland and create their extraordinary rural domesticity, including caring for a kitchen garden and a myriad of animals, among whichincluding a dog called Sapho.

Over the years, they transformed Plas Newydd into a Gothic fantasy of patchwork stained glass and elaborately carved oak. This beloved cottage orne, situated within the picturesque landscape of North Wales attracted a stream of visitors including Ann Seward, Caroline Princess of Wales, Dorothy and William Wordsworth and the lesbian industrialist Anne Lister.

The exhibition will be the first of its kind to make an intervention into the house through a radical re-designing of the domestic textiles of the home including quilts, cushions and curtains. The techniques used to create the new artworks directly reference Sarah Ponsonby’s own creative practice which included sketching, watercolour painting and embroidery. Through a combination of handcraft and digital techniques Sarah’s artistic legacy is woven back into the fabric of the house.

The new works are a loving intervention, and embroidered embellishment of this extraordinary tale of women who lived, and loved, differently despite enormous societal restrictions.

Beloved: Crafting Intimacies with the Ladies of Llangollen

This work is part of a larger set of site specific interventions at Plas Newydd Historic House and Gardens. This trio of quilts represent all three ladies of Llangollen, as they are buried together under the three sided monument at St Collens Church: Sarah Ponsonby, Mary Caryl and Eleanor Butler.

Photography by Ben Harrison Meek.

More about the Exhibition:

This exhibition presents a site-specific installation of quilted and textile artworks created by Manchester-based artist Sarah-Joy Ford after a period of artist residency at Plas Newydd Historic House and Gardens in Llangollen. The embroidered intervention is inspired by the deep and lifelong intimate relationship between the Ladies of Llangollen and the extraordinary home that they created together.

Plas Newydd was home to Lady Eleanor Butler (1739–1829) and Sarah Ponsonby (1755–1831), who captured the imagination of Regency society when they eloped from their families in Ireland to begin a life of exquisite retirement together, escaping the confines of their gendered fates of marriage and the convent. After a tour of Wales, – they chose to settle on the outskirts of Llangollen, in the small cottage they christened Plas Newydd in 1780. Here they lived together as life partners, with their maid and friend Mary Caryl who helped them escape from Ireland and create their extraordinary rural domesticity, including caring for a kitchen garden and a myriad of animals, among whichincluding a dog called Sapho.

Over the years, they transformed Plas Newydd into a Gothic fantasy of patchwork stained glass and elaborately carved oak. This beloved cottage orne, situated within the picturesque landscape of North Wales attracted a stream of visitors including Ann Seward, Caroline Princess of Wales, Dorothy and William Wordsworth and the lesbian industrialist Anne Lister.

The exhibition will be the first of its kind to make an intervention into the house through a radical re-designing of the domestic textiles of the home including quilts, cushions and curtains. The techniques used to create the new artworks directly reference Sarah Ponsonby’s own creative practice which included sketching, watercolour painting and embroidery. Through a combination of handcraft and digital techniques Sarah’s artistic legacy is woven back into the fabric of the house.

The new works are a loving intervention, and embroidered embellishment of this extraordinary tale of women who lived, and loved, differently despite enormous societal restrictions.

This was a site specific installation at Castlefield gallery commissioned to coincide with the Archives at Play exhibition, curated by Thomas Dukes. The work comprises of a text mediating on the emotional politics of working with archives, that has been fragmented and stitched onto white cotton archival gloves which are again scattered into the archive itself. Some seen, some unseen.

The installation was accompanied by a reading of Touching the Archive in its entirety, as well as another new text Archive Fever.

Click to listen to the readings, and in conversation with Thomas Dukes:

Touching the Archive Recording

Photography courtesy of Thomas Dukes and Castlefield Gallery.

2021

This work is both a banner and a quilt, digitally embroidered on a brother PRX, hand embellished with beads and sequins, quilted on a handi-quilter, bound and trimmed with hand made wool tassles.

The piece draws together two threads of interests from across my PhD research on quilting the lesbian archive. The work is a re-visioning of a lesbian-feminist, Sappho banner held in the collections at Glasgow Womens’s Library as part of the Lesbian Archive and Information Center Collection. The providence of the banner is unknown, and something I am trying to find out. However there is footage of the banner being used on a ‘stop the clause’ march in Manchester (section 28, a bill criminalising the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality as a ‘pretended family relationship). The footage is part of Video 28, made by Vera Productions in 1988 held as part of the Cinenova film archive.

The text across the top of the banner reading: ‘DYKES FOR TRANS RIGHTS’ is inspired by trans-lesbian solidarity in the Rebel Dykes community. At the Art & Archive Show there were flyers with this message and an invitation to attend trans pride with the Rebel Dykes the following week, where the Rebel Dykes marched under a banner with the same text.

The banner-quilt reflects on interconnected moments in time in lesbian history, bringing together two important lesbian banners from different time periods. It is statement on the importance of lesbian-trans solidarity in this difficulty moment, whilst acknowledging that the two identities are of course always intersecting, and often synonymous.

Dimensions: 250cm (w) x 135 (h)

Images from Change Everything Exhibition, at The Depot.

Photograph: courtesy of Ray Okudzeto

More information about the Rebel Dykes: https://www.rebeldykes1980s.com/

More information about the Lesbian Archive and Information Center Collection: https://womenslibrary.org.uk/explore-the-library-and-archive/the-archive-collection/the-lesbian-archive/

Installation as part of Proximity residency at Abingdon Studios, Blackpool.

2021

These sculptural quilts are part of a wider series of works that play with binding practices, taking unfinished quilts and samples, binding them with archival ribbon into tight bundled parcels. This process is a kind of exaggerated form of quilting, the ribbon biting into the stuffed fabric creating an exaggerated relief.

These two works were created from unfinished quilt samples, the digitally embroidered snakes were inspired by research into illustration practices in lesbian and queer periodicals in the Lesbian Archive and Information Centre collection (Glasgow Women’s Library). The satin fabric was stitched with a pin tuck foot, in order to create ridges, caught between the two lines of threads, acting as the inverse of quilting points. The works shift between digital and the hand, from the swiftness of digital embroidery, to painstaking hand embellishment.

Installation part of Proximity residency and exhibition at Abingdon Studios and Gallery in Blackpool.

A new configuration of the ‘maps to lesbian utopia’ silk scarves.

And ‘Log Cabin’ riso prints created in collaboration with Jordan Taylor as part of our log cabin project.

This is a digital embroidery especially created for my exhibition at The British Textile Biennale 2022; Oranges are not the only fruit at Accrington Library.

The work draws together from the original first edition cover of Jeanette Winterson’s ground breaking novel Oranges are not the only fruit which was created by Susan Slugget. The work also integrates a site specific references to the beautiful green art decco tiles that decorate Accrington Library.

This quilted-sculpture pays femmage to Donna Jackson, honourably discharged from the US Army in 1991 under homophobic chapter 15. After which she was a cover girl for lesbian erotica magazine: On Our Backs. The quilt extends her wilful act of dangerous visibility, and precarious pleasure.

Bound and unfurling, lounging on the floor, portions of the 500x450cm embroidery are visible, others hidden. Revealing and concealing: secrets tucked in folds. Like the archive that inspired it: the quilt is vast, full of feeling and in it’s entirety: always, inevitably unknowable.

A quilt can be a war flag, hung on a washing they might be the flags of an army marching to war, or the banners at a protest (Atwood, 1996). The quilt can also be armour, as in some of the first instances recorded ““quilted undergarments worn beneath armour afforded both warmth and protection” (Jones, 2016, p. 11). This quilt recognises the vulnerability, and risk that Donna Jackson took in exposing herself, and her desires, and offers a retrospective act of reparation, and protection – all be it too late, and out of time.

Shortlisted for The Janome Fine Art Textile Award 2021 and exhibited at The Festival of Quilts, and the Knit and Stitch Shows in London & Harrogate.

Photos by Bex Howard.

Quilt based on the personal archive collection of Fisch, organiser, Drag King, Rebel Dyke and . The central portrait is based on an original portrait taken by Lola Flash.

Created for the Rebel Dykes Art and Archive Exhibition.

Part of the Textile Collection at The Whitworth.

The Rebel Dykes originated in the 1980s as a group that merged outsider cultures to create fresh feminist explorations of art, sex and activism! Now, The Rebel Dykes Art and Archive Show brings this group of artists back together for the first time in almost 40 years and unites important underrepresented cultural histories with contemporary dyke culture; inviting a variety of younger artists to exhibit new works alongside the dykes who paved their way.

Curated by: artist and archivist Atalanta Kernick (of the Rebel Dykes), and artist and cultural producer, Kat Hudson (of Lesley Magazine).

REBEL DYKES ART AND ARCHIVE SHOW shines a spotlight on an underexposed lesbian community of 1980s London; a community with connections to Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp and to major cities in Britain, Europe and US, especially San Francisco, New York, Helsinki and Berlin.

Artists:

Angie Taylor, Anne marie Le Ble, Anne Robinson , Annette Kennerley , Ashton Attz , Atalanta Kernick , Autojektor Bella Podpadec Bernice Mulenga Cherry Auhoni Darren Evans Del La Grace Volcano

Dixie Thomas, Eleanor Louise West Emily Howard Emily Witham Emma Hindley Harri Shanahan Jane Campbell Jessica Tanzer Jill Posener Joy Yamusangie Kai Fiain Kat Hudson Kate Charlesworth Kate Jessop Kitchou, Laney Shimmin, Lola Flash Lucy Martin Max Disgrace Mystical Femmes: Katayoun Jalilipour Tallulah Haddon Nina Wakeford, Phyllis Christopher , Poulomi Desai, Rachael House Rene Matić Roxana Halls Roz Kaveney RUB Magazine India Jaggon Imogen Cleverley Sadie Lee Sarah Jane Moon Sarah-Joy Ford Siân A. Williams Siobhan Fahey and Tessa Boffin

A femmage to Phylis Christopher’s portrait of Shar Rednour - the ultimate femme.

https://sharrednour.com/

\\https://phyllischristopher.com/

Wet and Wild (veiled) 1,2&3

2021

The Veiled Wet and Wild series re-visions are another depiction of the lesbian amazon. Each veil bears a digitally embroidered, hand beaded, symbol from the lesbian archive. Glimpsed beneath these protective emblems, is another layer of embroidery based on photographs by the ground-breaking lesbian artist and academic Tessa Boffin (1960-1992). The series, titled Wet and Wild Women of the Cleaxe age was published in Quim magazine (1989-1994); a British lesbian erotic publication established in resistance to the censorship of lesbian erotic cultures during the feminist/lesbian sex wars.

We think of the archive as an orderly record of history: a collection of available and accessible materials. But the archive is vast, and its objects include records of intimate encounters, secret languages and the fragments of complex lives. The veil is a reminder that in a contemporary moment defined by online immediacy, that the lesbian archive must be approached with tenderness and encountered intimately. Visibility is not our only weapon in the fight for lesbian, and queer liberation.

Photos by Elle Brotherhood.

Archives and Amazons (Quilt 150cm x 150cm)

2021

The amazon warrior is iconic in lesbian feminist culture; she represents the strength and ferocity of women unbridled from patriarchy. In Greek Mythology amazons were fierce warrior women, skilled in battle and war craft. Lesbian writers, poets, and artists in the 70s and 80s, including Mary Daly, Audre Lorde and Monique Wittig claimed the amazon as a lesbian symbol to connect with a heritage of powerful women, loving women and living without men. She appears repeatedly in the archive: in the Raging Dyke zine, Amazon Quarterly, Harpies, Quines magazine , Flirt magazine, the regular Amazon column in Sappho magazine as well appearing in popular culture in the figures of Wonder Woman and Xena Warrior Princess.

In Archives and Amazons four digitally embroidered amazons ride across the quilt, based on the illustration used on The Lesbian Archive and Information Centre Newsletters. The same illustration of an amazon also appeared on the cover of Amazon Quarterly, an American Lesbian Arts publication from the 1970s, who’s editors included Audre Lorde.

Photos by Elle Brotherhood.

Maps to Lesbian Utopia 1,2&3

Lambeth Womens Walk, Lesbos, Lesbian Land

Email to purchase £150 each: sarah_joy _ford@hotmail.co.uk

Hung as a patchwork this series of digitally printed silk scarves act as souvenirs from important places referenced in the LIAC collection. The first map depicts the Greek Island of Lesbos, home to the famous antiquarian poet Sappho, and the root origin of the term lesbian. The second depicts a map of Women’s History Walk in North Lambeth, organised by the Lesbian History Group (1984-1995). These history walks allowed women to feel connected to the queer and lesbian pasts of a place that were often not acknowledged by mainstream culture. The final scarf depicts a map to find Lesbian Land in the outer Hebrides, Scotland, from an advertisement for a lesbian retreat in Raging Dyke zine. Dyke Lands, and Women’s lands were, and still are an important place for women to retreat from patriarchy and create their own communities.

Photos by Elle Brotherhood.

2021

Digitally embroidered and hand beaded.

Inspired by hand illustrated lesbian-feminist zine culture.

In the Mud

Commissioned for the Beyond the Binary project at Pitt Rivers Museum. On view until 8th March 2022

https://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/event/beyond-the-binary

2020

40cm x 40cm each.

Digital embroidery, hand beading and quilting.

Each arrow is a re-working of an original flyer for ‘chain reaction’ - the first lesbian S&M club night in the UK.

The original flyers are part of Fisch’s (King Frankie Sinatra) personal collection.

2020

Digitally printed silk scarves

£150 each, email to buy: sarah_joy_ford@hotmail.co.uk

Based on the personal collection and memories of King Frankie Sinatra

https://www.karenfisch.co.uk/

This installation explores the remnants and workings out of art practice as archive. The work presents the gathered archive materials, including original letters and gifts from Women I have worked with and admired, alongside the paintings, drawings and textile samples that form the basis for my finished works.

This interactive work was presented as part of the PROXIMITY residency at Paradise Works in 2019.

This quilt is the first part of a larger quilted project that explored the tender bravery of Donna Jackson.

Donna was a an army dyke, discharged in 1990 for coming out as gay. She was featured as a cover girl on On Our Backs magazine in 1991. This was long before public challenges to ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’, and she was both thrown into the lime light and shunned.

This work is a love letter to her erotic fearlessness.

This is an on-going series of small embroidered patches exploring and celebrating lesbian identity and identification.

If you would like to make a purchase please get in contact.

This work was developed in response to the photo series Sex Magic published by Phyllis Christopher in On Our Backs magazine.

A trio of works based on the photography of Phyllis Christopher. This series Sex Magic was published in On Our Backs magazine.

Works inspired by Annie Sprinkle’s photographic series ‘Gloved Love’ published in On Our Backs magazine, that powerfully eroticised safe sex for lesbians during the AIDs crisis.

2018

Exhibited at Hard Craft, Vane Gallery, Newcastle.

Inspired by the Vera Holme archive collection at London School of Economics.

Photos by Judith Fieldhouse.

2018

The quilt and its embroidered motifs re-cite and re-imagine images, anecdotes and symbols from the Papers of Vera (Jack) Holme held at The Women’s Library Archives at The London School of Economics. It was created through a process of patchworking together the imagery and iconography of the suffrage movement alongside the symbols and signifiers of lesbian existence, culture and intimacy. The quilt is an intervention into heteronormative commemorative narratives, and a tender attempt at giving voice to lesbian desire, intimacy and memory in the archive. The quilt was created as part of the Hard Craft project and exhibition at Vane Gallery in Newcastle, 2018.

Central to the quilt are the elaborately embroidered initials EH and VH; all the other designs extend around this central motif. This sapphic monographing directly references the bed that Vera Holme and Evelina Haverfield (her partner) shared. After Evelina’s death in 1920, Vera wrote a list of belongings she wanted to be returned from their shared home. On that list was ‘1 Bed with carved sides V.H. and E.H.’ and below ‘1 set of Carving tools’ (Personal Papers 7VJH/4) suggesting not only that their bed was inscribed with their initials, but also that this may well have been done by hand by the women themselves. This cannot be anything other than an act of love, devotion and commemoration, within which these women chose to locate the bed as a site of shared importance to them. Made for the bed, quilts bring warmth and comfort as well as beauty. The quilt is soft, it absorbs—sweat and fluids holding memories like stains. (Sorkin 2012) A quilt can keep stories. This quilt re-tells the story of this romantic gesture. In a year of politics and publics, the quilt returns to the most intimate space of the shared bed.

Photos by Judith Fieldhouse.

I want, I want

Collaboration with Juliet Flemming.

Inspired by Palcwezski postcard archive.

Exhibited as part of Hard Craft, Vane Gallery, Newcastle.

2018

Exhibited as part of Queen

Inspired by Jeanette Winterson’s novel Oranges are not the only fruit and the BBC adaptation.

2018

Exhibited as part of Queen, Strange Perfume and Decorating Dissidence.

Inspired by momentous depictions of love between women on screen.

2018

Informed by Jackie Stacey’s essay ‘Deviant Relations: she is not herself’ that examines the monstrosity of sameness, cloning and lesbian desire in Alien Resurrection.

2018

2018

Collaboration with Jordan Taylor.

Originally displayed for the launch of Strange Perfume at South London Gallery.

2018

Inspired by the interviews with Edith Eyde (Lisa Ben) as part of the Daughters of Bilitis video project hosted online by the Lesbian Herstory Archives, New York.

2018

In honour of Max Feldman’s song Angry Athis:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZwnYY2Yg78

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