Sarah-Joy Ford
Dr Sarah-Joy Ford is a Todmorden based artist and independent scholar working with quilting to explore the complexities and pleasures of queer communities, histories and archives.
This practice sits at the intersection of digital and traditional: using strategies of quilting, digital embroidery, digital print and hand embellishment. Sarah-Joy’s quilts draw on the materially driven power of textiles to facilitate deep emotional and pleasure responses which is rooted in its ubiquity, its ability to access our everyday memories, of soft blankets, mothers’ skirts and the feel of cloth against skin. A deep material investment in surface pattern design, and embellishment is part of a femme-ethical methodology that prioritises softness, emotionality, and aesthetic preoccupation.
Artist and Scholar
Solo exhibitions include Rabbit at Bury Art Museum 2024, HARE at Bobinska Brownlee Gallery 2023 (London), Looking for Lesbians at ONE Gallery 2022 (Los Angeles), Beloved at Plas Newydd Historic House and Gardens 2022 (Llangollen). 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.
Her solo show dykeland is at The Whitaker (Rossendale) 4th June - 21st September 2025.
She is a Curatorial Researcher in lesbian art history at Bishopsgate Institute funded by the Paul Mellon Centre, and Visiting Research Fellow in The School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at The University of Leeds, jointly held with Rachael Field (Sept 2025-2028). Ford sits on the National Executive Committee for Artist Union Englan