Sarah-Joy Ford

Sarah-Joy Ford is a Textile Artist; Post Graduate Researcher and Associate Lecturer at Manchester School of Art. Exhibitions include Banner Culture, British Textile Biennale (Blackburn), Queen, COLLAR (Manchester) and Weaving Europe: The World as Mediation, Shelly Residence (Paphos). Curatorial projects include: The Guild: Contemporary Textiles, Templeworks (Leeds), Cut Cloth: Contemporary Textiles and Feminism, The Portico Library (Manchester) and Hard Craft, Vane Gallery (Newcastle). Public commissions include collaborative projects for The Yorkshire Year of the Textiles, Processions: a hundred years of suffrage and Beyond the Binary at The Pitt Rivers Museum. She is the recipient of an NWDTCP award for her PhD research examining quilting as a methodology for re-visioning British lesbian archive. She is co-director of the Queer Research Network Manchester, an interdisciplinary network connecting postgraduates across the Manchester Universities, as well as a member of Proximity collective.

Her current practice explores quilt making as an affective methodology for making re-visioning lesbian archival material. Through the embodied materiality of textiles and an affinity with the domestic, the works slip between public and private moments, protest and parade, desire and loss.