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Dykeland Volume II is a living exhibition: a new collaboration between artists Sarah-Joy Ford and Roma Havers, with work by poet Jane Campbell.

Dykeland presents a body of work created by the artist Sarah-Joy Ford that explores dyke, lesbian and queer relationships to land, placemaking, rurality and ecological activism. Through quilting, fragments of historical texts and archival material are drawn into intimate relationships with memory, gossip and pure lesbian feminist fantasy.

Each of the quilts in the exhibition are femmages to a poem from Jane Campbell’s forthcoming poetry collection, Dykeland and other secret islands, chronicling her experiences living on a Dykeland for nearly 25 years. Accompanying the quilts are Campbell’s original poems, and two animated short films. These works are an intimate archive of an inter-generational dyke friendship, and convivial artistic practices between Campbell and Ford. This is an interdisciplinary love letter to the relationship between dyke poetry and dyke visual art, and how we take care of each other, and the earth, in troubled times.

Dykeland Volume II is a living exhibition that continues at Outburst, with Sarah-Joy Ford, Roma Havers and poet Jane Campbell introducing the work and performing at a special event in the gallery on Friday 14th November 18:00hrs.

BIOGRAPHY

Sarah-Joy Ford is an Artist, Post-Graduate 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 hetero-patriarchy.

Her PhD research explores 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.