Looking for Lesbians presents a new body of work created for ONE Archives at the USC Libraries by Artist-in-Residence Sarah-Joy Ford. Her works respond to ONE's lesbian pulp fiction collection and other archival materials related to lesbian literature in Los Angeles. The exhibition brings together works on paper, photographs, textiles, books, and archival materials—to showcase the significant collection of lesbian pulp fiction at ONE and to highlight the legacy and significance of this collection. Taken together, the artwork and archival materials ask: how do we connect with histories held by archives and individuals? How can these histories be navigated by one individual and how can we interact with them now?
At the heart of the exhibition is a series of artworks that examine the sorority as a site of same sex intimacies and lesbian desire as well as brutal regulation of acceptable femininities. The work draws from the earliest lesbian pulp novel written by a woman, Vin Packer’s 1952 novel Spring Fire, and Ann Bannon’s slightly later 1957 novel Odd Girl Out, which set their stories of sapphic love and loss in a sorority. These new works produced by Ford explore the fascination with women’s societies and single sex spaces in lesbian culture. They include a quilt, a tracksuit, and embroidered patches. Their iconography is inspired by a range of lesbian symbols–from Anne Lister’s funerary hatchment to the labrys of Monique Wittig’s Amazons. The work claims a deliberately femme aesthetic, taking pleasure in shades of pink, pastel hues, satins, sequins, and decadent surfaces.
The new works are a response to Ford’s time spent in the archive, marking specific encounters and tracings of lesbian legacies at ONE. Using hand-made paper created out of archival waste, Ford crafts a visual record of the lesbian pulp collection at ONE, cross-referencing Barbara Grier’s Lesbiana ratings. She also visualizes a network of LA lesbian literature, including Carolyn Weathers and Jenny Wrenn’s Clothespin Press, the Lesbian Writers Series at In A Different Light Bookshop, and Terry Wolverton’s Excavations project at the Women’s Building.
This exhibition is curated by Alexis Bard Johnson. The exhibition is supported by ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, the partnership placement scheme from the North West Consortium Doctoral Training Center (Arts and Humanities Research Center), and Manchester Metropolitan University.
Photography by Pheonix Neri
https://one.usc.edu/
Beloved: Crafting Intimacies with the Ladies of Llangollen
Delight of my heart
My sweet love
My Beloved
My B
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.
Funding
The project is supported by Plas Newydd Historic House and Gardens, Clwydian Range and Dee Valley Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
This project is funded by the North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership through their Researcher-Led Knowledge Exchange scheme, with support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
You can read more about the project on the NWCDTP website here: https://www.nwcdtp.ac.uk/partners/plas-newydd/
How to Visit
Plas Newydd Historic House and Gardens, Llangollen, is open to the public every day 10AM - 4PM throughout the summer months.
The exhibition will be installed for viewing for the whole 2022 season at Plas Newydd from April 30th 2022 to October 30th 2022.
For more information about visiting Plas Newydd head to: www.plasnewyddllangollen.co.uk
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)
Log Cabin is a digital collaboration between Artists Jordan Taylor and Sarah-Joy Ford. Both crafty Queers interested in the visual cultures of queerness.
The log cabin is a traditional quilt pattern that plays with light and shadow surrounding a red center, associated hearth and home. The digital Log Cabin exhibition is a home for our collaboration. Log Cabin is a tool for artistic intimacy as well as a platform for thinking through what it means to craft in digital space, how digital/physical binaries might be undone and how our material practices might interweave online. As a digital quilt Log Cabin has no defined borders, it can continuously accumulate, sprawling, ever increasing; an expansive tool for imagining new works and possibilities.
Log Cabin was commisioned by Superbia, Manchester Pride: https://superbia.org.uk
https://log-cabin.org
Post it is a mail art project by Proximity Collective.
It is our strategy of connecting in-material in an increasingly imaterial world.
It is a paper loop between us; we work on top / in between and in addition to each other.
Masks For Life is a project with three parts:
1. We sell unique face masks , made and designed by Islington Mill artists, including those who have lost some or all income due to COVID-19. Our masks are quality fabric face coverings designed to protect you and others in public, as advised by health guidelines. Each design is limited edition, printed and hand made in Greater Manchester.
2. We donate free face masks. For every order placed we will also produce additional masks that can be donated for free to organisations or individuals in need. We have a special focus on our own city of Salford which has been disproportionately affected by the virus.
3. We amplify you! We will use our platforms to divert attention to other worthy projects that are also responding to COVID-19, such as Manchester Pink Scrubs and The Big Community Sew , supporting front-line workers and helping protect the community.
You can buy my masks, and those by lots of other wonderful Manchester based artists here: https://www.islingtonmill.com/masks-for-life/
This is an AHRC funded PhD project that proposes the quilt as an affective methodology for revisioning lesbian archival material in Britain. I am based at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University as part of the Post Graduate Arts and Humanities Centre.
The project includes research at Glasgow Women’s Library, London School of Economics, Feminist Archive North, Feminist Archive South and the personal collections of Phylis Christopher and Karen Fisch.
In their cumulative nature, quilts often have no centre defying conventional rules for formal, painterly arrangements – instead they can offer a democratic whole, a visual field outside of hierarchies (Donnell, 1990) (Showalter, 2012). This non-linear, materially driven form can offer a site for exploring the unruly experiences of the queer bodies; temporalities and affects. Although quilts have traditionally celebrated the milestones of a hetro-normative life; birth, marriage, children, death; this PhD subverts this tradition and proposes the quilt as a space collapsing linear time and encountering the un-expected affects of the British Lesbian Archive.
Proximity Collective is a group of practice based PhD students.
The collective considers questions of research, collaboration and temporality through a series of conversations and residencies.
The images are from a 2019 residency presentation at Paradise Works, Manchester.
Photos: Anya Stewart-Maggs
Hard Craft
Sarah-Joy Ford and Juliet Fleming
14 November – 15 December 2018
Vane Gallery, NewCastle
Women, like craft, are often portrayed as pleasant and placid. This exhibition celebrates protest and outrage, stitched into fabric and fired in the kiln. The suffragettes created a visual language of resistance through posters, pamplets, banners, sashes, handkerchief petitions and ceramic tableware. Many seemingly domestic objects became weapons of dissent and symbols for a societal revolution.
On the 100-year anniversary of partial women’s suffrage in the UK, this exhibition of collaborative work draws upon the material histories of dis-obedient craft.
Alongside the aesthetics of protest the exhibition also responds to the history of anti-suffragette propaganda. In particular the use of animalistic imagery that has long been a method employed to oppress and degrade marginalised groups as lesser, other and sub- or non-human. Here the artists are reclaiming an old insult depicting women as cats; gathering together symbols of female power and resistance. Through craft techniques these works celebrate a radical past, acknowledges the continuing struggle for equal rights, and makes a hopeful gesture toward a feminist future.
Sarah-Joy Ford is an artist, curator and researcher currently based in Manchester. She is a co-director of SEIZE projects (Leeds) and the Queer Research Network Manchester. She has studied at The University of Leeds, The Hungarian University of Fine Arts, The School of the Damned and Manchester School of Art. Recent exhibitions include Queen, COLLAR Gallery Manchester (2018) Weaving Europe: The World as Mediation, Shelly Residence, Paphos (2017) SuperYonic, Copeland Gallery, London (2017) and Wish You Were Here, Stryx Gallery, Birmingham (2016). Curatorial projects include The Guild: Contemporary Textiles, Templeworks, Leeds (2016) and Cut Cloth: Contemporary Textiles and Feminism, The Portico Library, Manchester (2017). She has been commissioned as part of The Yorkshire Year of the Textiles, University of Leeds (2016), Processions, Artichoke (2018) and is artist in residence for Strange Perfume, Chetham's Library, Manchester (2018). Ford is the recipient of an AHRC North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership Award for her PhD research examining quilting as a methodology for re-visioning British lesbian archive.
Juliet Fleming is an artist and curator. Born in London in 1991 and lives in Newcastle upon Tyne Fleming received BA Hons Fine Art from Newcastle University in 2015 and a Post Graduate diploma from Northumbria University in 2018 and is part of The Collective Studio, The NewBridge Project cohort 2018/19. Recent exhibitions include 'hubbub' GOLDTAPPED at The Middlesbrough Weekender, Middlesbrough (2018) ‘Six of one, half a dozen of the other’ Exchange Residency at The Royal Standard Liverpool and The NewBridge Project, Newcastle Upon Tyne (2018), ‘Close to you’, TESTT Space, Durham (2018), 'Aftertaste', The Trophy Room, Liverpool (2017) ‘I miss you, Blockbuster... ‘, is this it?, A217 Gallery, London (2017) ‘Worried Mother’ M I L K x Workplace takeover, Workplace Gallery, Gateshead, (2016). Fleming is the Director of GOLDTAPPED, an artist led initiative providing space for experimentation, development and support emerging artist practices.
Hard Craft: Events Program
Archive Screening: There is Power in the Material
Cinenova
There is Power in the Material is a screening of feminist film & video from the Cinenova collection. The moving image works explore the politics of domestic spaces and highlight the use of craft mediums within feminist and queer protest movements.
Cinenova is a volunteer-run charity preserving and distributing the work of feminist film and video makers. Cinenova was founded in 1991 following the merger of two feminist film and video distributors, Circles and Cinema of Women, each founded in 1979. Cinenova currently distributes over 400 titles that include artists’ moving image, experimental film, narrative feature films, documentary and educational videos made from the 1920s to the late 1990s.
Thursday 6th December 6-8pm
Vane Gallery
Talk: Activism on our sleeves: radical women and dress
Helen Antrobus, The People’s History Museum, Salford.
In this centenary year, marking 100 years since some women were able to vote, protest and civil disobedience have become more important than ever. From the Women’s March to the People’s Vote, the fight for our voices to be heard reflects similar struggles of 1000 years ago. The formidable women of the suffrage movement – from the law abiding suffragists to the militant suffragettes- truly demonstrated how to get organised – including being one of the first political groups to inject symbolic colours and patterns into their dress.
Protesters past and present have used symbolic dress as a way to proudly display their cause. From 1819 to 2018, join historian Helen Antrobus as she brings these stories to life.
Helen Antrobus is the Programme Officer at the People’s History Museum. She specialises in the history of radical and political women, particularly in the women’s suffrage movement. She is a regular contributor to programmes made for BBC One, BBC Four and BBC Radio 4.
Saturday 14th December 2-4pm
Vane Gallery
Processions, Artichoke Productions
Collaboration with Republica Internationale Women’s Football Team and LGBT Foundation, Manchester
This processions project celebrates women’s football and the radical possibilities for social change that it can bring. The banner raises the issues of ongoing sexism and homophobia faced by women in sport. Much anti-homophobia campaigning in sports has focused on men’s experiences, where as this collaboration focuses on the unique challenges of being female and gay. The banner champions grass roots football, in particular explicitly anti-fascist teams like Republica Internationale as spaces for celebrating LGBT people, and challenging ongoing discrimination.
Women’s rights belong to all women, and therefore we must have inclusion, representation and solidarity for all women before we have true equality.
More about Processions
PROCESSIONS was a once-in-a-lifetime mass participation artwork which celebrated one hundred years of votes for women.
In 1918, the Representation of the People Act gave the first British women the right to vote and stand for public office. One hundred years on, we invited women* and girls across the UK to come and mark this historic moment as part of a living portrait of women in the 21st century. On Sunday 10th of June, women and girls in Belfast, Cardiff, Edinburgh and London came together as part of this celebratory mass participation artwork. Wearing either green, white or violet, the colours of the suffragette movement, the PROCESSIONS appeared as a flowing river of colour through the city streets.
One hundred women artists were commissioned to work with organisations and communities across the UK to create one hundred centenary banners for PROCESSIONS as part of an extensive public programme of creative workshops.
QUEEN
Sarah-Joy Ford // Charley Blake Banks
PV____// Friday 17th August
6pm - 9pm
And then by appointment only
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
It has been known:
You are odd, because you refuse to be ignored.
You are not strong, but unhinged.
You don’t belong to yourself, you belong to the man you have seemed to define yourself and
the burn of their ropes by.
You pose no threat, retain no integrity and every commodity
You cannot be passionate, your greed is inflamed and you are obsessed.
There simply isn’t room for you.
Shut up, don’t speak up.
Your power is borrowed, not inherent
Your time limited, not lavish.
You are not active, you are passive
You are a receiver, naturally
We are fucked
Not fuckers
Don’t get on top, it’s too personal
Unless told, and then
I suppose it’s fine.
Right?
Do you want to know how hard I can really get?
I am rock hard, protecting myself.
And I can do it all on my own.
Without your stumbling, messy, hand-me-down masculinity.
You’re behind.
But it is me, fucking you.
Cutie.
Do you know the truth about Medusa?
No?
Thought not.
There is no tragedy written on these walls,
Glory, and the triumph
Succubus to the Siren
The most powerful pawn, we can indeed move in any direction.
Ripley
Wendy
Jeanette
Jon Benet
Reagan
Annie
Rosemary
Queens,
we, adore you.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
In new works, queer artists Sarah-Joy Ford and Charley Blake Banks both present ideas facilitating a more intimate reading on moments of women on screen. Queen looks to re-envision female desire on screen away from the male gaze, outside of the tragedies they are so often commodified and besieged within.
Created separately, these new works attempt to harmonise a common voice. As practicing queer artists, Queen speaks directly to on-screen representations of women both artists encountered when growing up.
Using their practices, both Sarah Joy-Ford and Charley Blake Banks attempt to dismantle filmic stereotyping on sexuality and gendered identities.
Hazy nostalgia for queer subplots, Queen addresses the need for recognition and necessity to see powerful women in control of their sexualities – even if that means re-inscribing their agencies through art marking.
Queen is a direct response to proclaim critical debate outside of bleached ideals on representation of women.
A chance to declare through the in-doctrine, the anxiety and the trepidation on gender difference.
To reclaim, and unitedly stamp out the dread of difference.
This is the final (time) girl(s).
Cut Cloth is an exhibition, publication and series of workshops that examine the shifting role of textiles within contemporary feminist art practices. The project takes place at The Portico Library and The Whitworth in Manchester in June and July 2017.
Cut Cloth contemplates the rise in popularity of art textiles and its impact on its value as a specifically feminist mode of expression. Once a belittled and marginalized medium, it was a radical act [in itself] to bring women’s work into the gallery space. Artists looked to both subvert and celebrate textiles in order to disrupt the very femininities that it played a role in constructing. This project of reclamation and elevation is by no means finished- textiles still sit in an ambiguous space between art, craft, private and public space. However the increasing popularity and commercialisation of textiles, and of feminism in art and culture must be reflected upon. Cut cloth looks toward strategies that respond to these new challenges, drawing upon feminist legacies whilst acknowledging the shifting politics of cloth in contemporary culture.
Exhibiting Artists: Hannah Hill, Katie Lundie, Rebecca Halliwel Sutton, Sarah-Joy Ford, Sophie King, Eleanor Edwardes, Orly Cogan, Wendy Huhn, Tilleke Schwarz & Bethan Hughes.
Exhibition: 9th June – 5th July at The Portico Library, Manchester
Contributing Writers: Professor Janis Jefferies, Elizabeth Emery, Charlotte Cullen, Dr Julia Skelly, Dr Alexandra Kokoli, Dr Christine Checinska, Gill Crawshaw, Jesse Harrod, Peninna Barnett & Dr Jennifer Harris.
The project is kindly supported by Arts Council England, The Portico Library and The Whitworth Art Gallery.
Please visit the website for more information: https://www.cutcloth.co.uk/
The steady decline of the British textile industry throughout the 20th century has seen communities and ways of life vanish within only a few generations, mills and workshops fallen silent and dark. Faster, more efficient technologies and business practices have removed textiles abroad and depleted our understanding and appreciation for the craft and the skills craftspeople still possess. The Guild gave a platform to eight contemporary artists working with cloth, inviting us to explore the progressive possibilities of contemporary textile practice.
The exhibition was held at in the historic cloth-working city of Leeds at Temple Works, a repurposed Victorian flax mill which once boasted the largest room in Europe. Behind the Works’ mock-Egyptian pillars the Guild offers a look at the new forms taking shape in British textile practices as a diminished craft and its community puts down new roots in the 21st Century.
The Guild also hosted an evening of discussion lead by
textile artists and theorists. speakers included:
Claire Barber – University of Huddersfield
Professor Janis Jefferies – Goldsmiths University
Chris Burgess – Curator, Peoples History Museum
Morwenna Catt – textile artist
Sarah-Joy Ford
Ordering death, hunger, weather and the nearness of chaos
Sarah-Joy Ford
Ordering death, hunger, weather and the nearness of chaos
The Temple of the Tongue.
Rosie Vohra.
The Temple of the Tongue.
Rosie Vohra.
The Temple of the Tongue.
Rosie Vohra.
Stature.
Warp & Weft.
Go Faster.
Charlotte Cullen.
Go Faster.
Charlotte Cullen.
Augury: Birds for the eyes of a shaman.
Morwenna Catt.
Augury: Birds for the eyes of a shaman.
Morwenna Catt.
Dropping the A Bomb.
Jake Kent.
Her Dress, Her Care
Hannah Jenkins
Guild: Installation shot.
Warped and Left.
Francis Lloyd Jones.
Isobell Holland.
The Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery, 2016
The Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery, 2016
The Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery, 2016
Queer theory draws on the forces of the outsider, the other and the non normative. Using this apparatus of Otherness it is possible to bring to the forefront historical narratives that may have fallen from the canon of history.
A collaborative group of works casts aside male-dominated tropes of historical storytelling and looks elsewhere to illuminate unspoken narratives.
These works rearrange historical perspectives: rather than acting as a direct response to the portraits of John and Jane Marshall, they dedicate time, effort and a platform to ‘unimportant’ (queer) histories.
Here we shed light on the little-documented relationship between Jane Pollard and Dorothy Wordsworth through a series of intimate and personal letters that paint a picture of a tender and loving relationship between two creative women.
This somewhat forgotten relationship not only provides a radical alternative history to prevalent (masculine) historical narratives, but also acts as a lens through which to view them. The act of reviewing these narratives through from a contemporary queer standpoint opens up new perspectives, allowing us to create new histories and problematize existing ones.
Over the course of two weeks Leeds residents, commuters and visitors to the city will be able to take a detour from their everyday routine and discover contemporary art on their way to work, on the high street, out shopping or on a lunch break.
In addition to physical posters pasted onto poster drums across Leeds City Centre, www.paste-leeds.co.uk is an accompanying website of digital works. Taking ‘copy and paste’ as a starting point, SEIZE has invited the artists to create images, videos, gifs or playlists that address ideas surrounding the virtual and real in contemporary art practice, and their crossover in everyday life.
Paste will therefore exists simultaneously as both URL and IRL, alluding to a perceived slippage between digital and physical production channels. Responding to a media arena saturated with competing advertising and brands, Paste explores the dissolving boundaries between artist-made, user-generated and commercial content in the wake of networked systems of information.
The artists in PASTE are:
Alice Khalilova
Derek Mainella
Lorna Mills
Mathew Parkin
Alfie Strong
Oliver Sutherland
Bradley Waller
Jennifer Chan
Adham Faramawy
Jack Fisher
Joey Holder
Ashley Holmes
Emilie Houldsworth
Sebastian Jefford
Will Kendrick
PASTE took place in Leeds from 5 - 18 October 2015, coinciding with the opening of the British Art Show 8, an exhibition that also proposes to explore the convergence of the real and the virtual, and the status of the physical object in contemporary culture.
SEIZE Projects benefits from the generous support of Leeds City Council’s Leeds Inspired funding scheme that has enabled them to realise the PASTE project. Other partners include &Model Gallery, Leeds.
Maps of the poster drum locations are available to download HERE.
For the full press release, click HERE
[Art work in image: Alfie Strong]
SEIZE Projects
PASTE Exhibition, Leeds 2015
