The art of pleasure: in conversation with Sarah-Joy Ford

Come and join artist Sarah-Joy Ford, in conversation with Axis's Lucy Wright. We'll chat about Sarah-Joy's upcoming project, RABBIT, for Bury Art Museum [opens May 2024], which explores soft toys as transitional objects, the emotional politics of textiles and ideas around queerness and childhood.

About Sarah-Joy

Sarah-Joy Ford is an artist, researcher and Associate Lecturer at Manchester School of Art. Ford works 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.

The work claims a femme aesthetic, indulging in shades of pinks, pastel hues, satins, sequins and decadent surface embellishment. Working with decorative textiles situates the practice within histories of gendered marginalisation, and a lineage of artists reclaiming cloth as a powerful language for disrupting discrimination, erasure and hetro-patriarchy.

Her recent PhD explored quilt making as an affective methodology for making re-visioning lesbian archival material. The loving attention and protective qualities of the quilt offer a reparative site for investing in lesbian archives inherently bound to a history of injury and marginalisation. Although quilts have traditionally celebrated the milestones of a heteronormative life – birth, marriage, children, death – this project subverts this tradition and proposes the quilt as a space collapsing linear time and encountering the unexpected affects of the lesbian archive.

Axis is committed to meeting the needs of people with disabilities, recognising that a disability can affect people in different ways. If you have an access requirement that you feel might impact your ability to attend or take part in this event, please contact Lucy on lucy@axisweb.org in advance and we will do our best to help you. Closed caption live transcription is available as standard at all Zoom events.