Sarah-Joy Ford is an artist and independent scholar working 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. Sarah-Joy’s deep material investment in surface pattern design, and embellishment is part of her femme-ethical methodology that prioritises softness, emotionality, and aesthetic preoccupation. 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.
Spring Fire, featured in Tangled Up, examines 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. Inspired by a fascination with women’s societies and single sex spaces in lesbian culture; the iconography and symbols range 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.
Also featured in Tangled up is Tri Epsilon. The tracksuit is a uniform from an imaginary archive—a sorority house that might have been. This photographic series blurs the imagined space with the real archive space. Photographed inside the stacks of the ONE Archives, whose current building was once a fraternity house, a rewriting is enacted. Unlike the femme of the lesbian pulp novel Led Astray and then cajoled, enticed, or forced into a heterosexual union, here she is at home and happy, reading, and resolutely lesbian.
