“Dyke is our armor:” A conversation with dyke artist Sarah-Joy Ford’s about her new exhibition Dykeland (2025)

Ford in front of one of the quilts on display, Dykeland. Photo courtesy of Alana Lake, Sarah-Joy Ford, and Cassinelli Mills.

BY EMMA CIESLIK June 27, 2025

Quilting has served as a vehicle of queer expression and activism for decades. Just this past May 17th, the American Civil Liberties Union displayed 258 square quilts--9,000-square-feet overall--on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Created by members of the trans community and allies across the country, including at a quilt panel-making event at the Brooklyn Museum in February, the installation continues a rich tradition of queer and trans fabric art, following the completion of the Euphoria Quilt created by trans quilter Eliot Anderberg earlier this year. 

But perhaps the person who knows this best is Dr. Sarah-Joy Ford, an artist and independent scholar based in Todmorden, West Yorkshire. Ford specifically explores how quilt making serves as an affective methodology for exploring and sharing lesbian and queer archival material. 

A principal example is Ford’s exhibition Dykeland: Volume 1, which opened at The Whitaker Museum & Art Gallery in Rossendale on June 7th. The exhibition explores the history of dyke and lesbian landscapes, specifically queer relationality to placemaking and preservation, in the United Kingdom. Dykeland: Volume 1 interweaves historical material with personal memory and hopeful fantasy in response to Jane Cambell’s upcoming poetry collection Dykeland and other secret islands, and is hung alongside art by Jane Cambpell. 

Note: Ford and other queer women flatly reject the censorship of the word “dyke.” “Dyke” like “queer,” has historically and even today been used as a slur against women who love women but is reclaimed by the community. Dyke, for Ford, carries intense cultural and political weight, reflecting the legacies of misogyny within the LGBTQ+ community, strength of lesbians caring for gay men dying of AIDS, and resistance at the front of resistance movements including the Women’s Rights Movement for which they were labelled the Lavender Menace. 

After the exhibition’s opening, I sat down with Ford to learn more about her work, the impact of this exhibition, and the history of queer quiltmaking. 

The Fool (2025), by Sarah-Joy Ford. Watercolor painting, digitally printed cotton, digital embroidery, hand embellished glass beads and sequins, wadding, plain cotton, long arm quilting, bias binding. Created by stitching support from Deborah Louise Ford and Jessica Stringer-Fewtrill. Photo courtesy of Alana Lake, Sarah-Joy Ford, and Cassinelli Mills. 

Cieslik: What sparked this exhibition? 

Ford: This is an exhibition that has been brewing for a long while. It follows my interest in lesbian, dyke and feminist placemaking, and our relationship with the earth. I am interested in how we create and connect to these spaces for communities to come together to think about what it means to be in community with other dykes. This emerged while I was undertaking my practice based PhD research at Manchester School of Art: “Quilting the Lesbian Archive: quiltmaking as an affective methodology for re-visioning lesbian archive materials.”

This work addressed the emotional and affective textures of the archive as a lesbian place, somewhere to find intergenerational and intertemporal connections and community. It was here that I found the traces of queer women’s placemaking practices, and land movements here in the UK. Something that really excited me because the examples I was familiar with from literature were American, Australian or Canadian. For example, Lesbian Land (1985) by Joyce Chaney, an incredible archive of writing by women living on lesbian lands in the USA. 

But across the UK, we have a much more unwritten history of women's lands and dyke lands, and still there's a lot of secrecy around the topic, for the safety of those communities, as well as residual shame, frustration and anger around historic community feuds. The very recent (February 2025) Lesbian Earth special issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies brings together incredible writing around the difficulties in these communities around racism, settler colonialism, cultural appropriation.

But more than anything this exhibition is a love letter to my friend Jane. Jane Campbell is an icon of our dyke community here in the UK. A poet, activist, artist and one of the stars of the 2021 documentary film Rebel Dykes, that chronicled the lives, loves, activism and art of queer women in London in the 1980s. Jane invited me to her home, on dykeland. My first experience of a dykeland community, and it changed my world. 

After the success of her debut, and award winning collection Slowly as the Clouds (2021), she has penned a new collection of poems called Women’s Land and Other Secret Islands about her experience of living on this land for 25 years. And it is absolutely beautiful. I still feel so lucky to have been given a sneak preview of this hugely important poetry collection, while a publisher is still yet to be confirmed. 

Each of the new works in the exhibition are direct responses to Jane's poems from that collection. They are the result of 5 years of deeply creative and life affirming friendship that has shaped my dyke identity, and commitment to our community. My quilts hang alongside the lesbian library installation (complete with a participatory lesbian library book to leave your own recommendations and a free dykeland reading list made in collaboration with George Gibson). Amongst them are nestled Jane’s poems including; “Bookish,” “Coven,” “Dykeland,” “Dyke Wedding,” and “Away” taking you through the exhibition. 

In the film room, two of Jane Campbell’s new art films are being screened: The Gardener directed by Efa Blosse-Mason with Sofie Marsh, and Gossip/Clecs directed by: Harri Shanahan. These works are an intimate archive of an inter-generational dyke friendship, and our convivial artistic practices. A sapphic ode to the intimate relationship between lesbian poetry and lesbian visual art. 

As a practice based scholar I had wanted to undertake a research project, and eventually write a book about lesbian lands in the UK. But the more time I spent on the land, and with the archives of lesbian lands, I came to the realization that writing didn’t feel like the right methodology. Some things just need to sit outside of the institutional frameworks of academia, some histories need to be told in ways more tender. 

Cieslik: What about the title? How did it get the name Dykeland? 

Ford: The exhibition was originally called Lesbianland. At other times, it has been called The Land. But last year I was on a residency in Yorkshire, working on a series for the show called the Dyke Arcana. I was fired for using the word “dyke” in my writing about my artwork, and refused to be censored. I was told my identity was offensive, and that it constituted the creation of a “threatening and intimidating workplace”. 

As a precarious freelance worker this is not the first time I have lost work for being a dyke, and it probably won’t be the last. It is becoming a more familiar story, often in instances of intra-community censorship. Dyke has become a dirty word again, and so we must reclaim it relentlessly, again. 

I found the experience devastating, and I felt hopeless as Trump’s war on DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) raged on in America, the Supreme Court ruling and the subsequent EHRC guidance that excludes trans people from single sex spaces, and protections under equality law. I have felt afraid. But it is the love and wisdom of experience of my older dyke friends that brings me strength, comfort and hope. We have been here before, and things can change. But there is strength in numbers. I have been a long time member of the Artist Union England, and they were there to support me in challenging homophobia, transphobia and unfair working practices in the organisation. As many other artists are increasingly facing issues of censorship, and discrimination I have joined the AUE national executive to lead on LGBTQ+ artist rights, and support.

The experience of being told I couldn’t call myself a dyke made me realise how important that word is to me, my friends and my community. I use dyke, lesbian and femme to describe myself. Lesbian for me is a description of my sexuality. But Dyke, for me, is a political identity. It marks my commitment to my community of women loving women, tying me to a history of radical rebel dykes who refused to stay small and silent. 

When I called Jane to tell her I had changed the name of the exhibition to Dykeland, she laughed, and told me she had also changed the name of her poetry collection to: Dykeland and Other Secret Islands. In reclamation there is power. Dyke is our armour. It is a protective spell. Our identity may be reclaimed from the dirt we were pushed into, but in our mouths hate speech is transformed, spat back and becoming a badge of honour. It is ours now and we won’t give it back. 

A detail of a rabbit on one of Ford’s quilts. Photo courtesy of Alana Lake, Sarah-Joy Ford, and Cassinelli Mills. 

Cieslik: This exhibition specifically explores positionality and placemaking. One of my favorites is Maps to Lesbian Utopia (2021), which includes a map to Lesbos and the Women’s History Walk in North Lambeth, organized by the Lesbian History Group (1984-1995). What is locating and tethering dyke history to spaces in the UK important?

Ford: This is the latest iteration of Maps to Lesbian Utopia created for Archives and Amazons: a quilters guide to the Lesbian archive at HOME in 2021, which presented a body of work responding to years of research in the Lesbian Archive and Information Centre Collection at Glasgow Women’s Library. This part of my life was deeply marked by sapphic pilgrimages to Lesbos, Llangollen and LA. On a Rebel Dykes walking tour in Brixton with my mum, I fortuitously met Fisch aka King Frankie Sinatra, who would become the topic of one of my thesis chapters, a muse for many quilts and a wonderful friend. I also spent a lot of time trying to find out why we didn't have a lesbian archive in the UK. And being jealous because you have the Lesbian Herstory Archives in the US. I'm so desperate to go. 

But I discovered that there was The Lesbian Archive and Information Center, founded in London in 1984. The center lost its funding with the loss of the Greater London Council under Thatcher’s neo-liberal conservative government. But internal disputes, political fractures across the divides of race, class, disability and sexual expression also contributed to the breaking up of the archive. In 1995, a large portion of the archive arrived in a van to Glasgow Women’s Library, the only accredited women’s museum in Britain where the collection is still housed. Efforts to catalogue the unruly collection are ongoing. It was here that I encountered the maps, tucked into mint green archive boxes - leaving me clues to the ways in which lesbians have always been making space for ourselves. The scarves are my souvenirs from the lesbian archive. 

With soaring property prices and rental market, lesbian place making in the UK is often transient, and or fleeting. Dyke parties like Butch Please, King of Clubs, Butch Revival and previously Shit Lesbian Disco are carving out spaces in better venues, on better nights. Although we have lost festivals such as L Fest, York Lesbian Art Festival, we have gained new places to gather like Out and Wild Festival, and Oban Lesbian Weekend. Dykes are visible now each year in London on the Dyke March. Last year, Emily Witham organised the first Dyke Art Market and two-thousand lesbians turned up. Dykes lined up in the sun for an hour, and it felt like so much is possible for us. You can find dykeland if you know where to look. 

Other Secret Islands: Coven (2025), Other Secret Islands: Away (2025), and Other Secret Islands: Witches (2022), by Sarah-Joy Ford. Watercolor painting, digitally printed cotton, digital embroidery, hand embellished glass beads and sequins, wadding, plain cotton, long arm quilting, bias binding. Each quilt was created with stitching support from Deborah Louise Ford and Jessica Stringer-Fewtrill. Photo courtesy of Alana Lake, Sarah-Joy Ford, and Cassinelli Mills. 

Cieslik: On your website you write: “although quilts have traditionally celebrated the milestones of a heternormative life -- birth, marriage, children, death -- this project subverts this tradition and proposes the quilt as a space collapsing linear time and encountering the unexpected effects of the lesbian archive.” Can you share more about this subversion and the history queer quiltmaking?

Ford: We cannot talk about queer quilt making without talking about the global project of the AIDs memorial quilt. The quilt is a deliberate, communal and monumental disruption of domestic and public space. It is the world’s largest, and most powerful artworks. But it leaves a complex political legacy and questions about memorialisation in queer communities, something Julia Byran-Wilson works through evocatively in her brilliant book, Fray: Art and Textile Politics (2017). Last week marked the first showing of the quilt at the Tate Modern in London, with accompanying programming including Cleeve Jones, and workshops with the Artist Karina Thompson. 

I was drawn to the quilt for its sense of feminine domesticity, intimacy and softness. Quilts warm and protect, but they can also obscure violence. Quilts are firstly textiles, constructed from cloth.

The needle was one of the first technologies, making domesticity possible. The first computer was a loom. Cloth is the mediator between our bodies, ourselves and the world. We are always in relationship to cloth. And I think making art in cloth helps speak to that ubiquity, to connect in small and large ways to everyone’s different everyday. I love the ways in which each person brings their own cloth stories, to the interpretation of the work. 

The quilt sits on the bed. The bed which has always been a fascinating site for me to think about desire, sexuality, sickness, death and queerness. In women’s and lesbian history the bed, and bed sharing practices are a contested site of devious intimacy, the question always circling back sooner rather than later to - did they do it? A bed can be a place to sleep, to rest, to fuck, and a place to dream, to plot. 

I wanted to think about this idea of inheritance and lineage outside of heteronormative ways of thinking about time, and how we build a life. Heteronormativity, perhaps. And for me, my work in quilting is always about seeking intimacy and connection. I grew up in a northern village isolated from lesbain representation, or community and going to school during, and in the aftermath of Section 28 (a British law prohibiting the “promotion of homosexuality”). My becoming lesbian, gave me new ways to imagine intimacy, and love. I found my queer family, my dyke community and my wife. It also brought with it a sense of identity, community, belonging and strength. My search for lesbian connection in history, memory and stories became a constant thread in my artistic enquiries. It radically changed my world. 

I think lesbians have a strange relationship to time. And our longing for women is not perturbed by something so small as death. I mean, Sappho was already thinking through her poetry that “someone will remember us, I say, even in another time”. And in another time Natelie Barney hosted her literary salons and built her temple to friendship in her Paris Garden, making space for a rich culture of lesbian creativity and connection. Artists, writers, and actresses including Collete, Radclyffe Hall, Dolly Wilde, Romaine Brookes, and Liane de Pougy. We are romantics. 

I started to think about the quilts not as depicting the past, but a site for working through my longing for a lesbian past. Heather Love writes of this sensation as feeling backward. The quilt is my devotional object. They are my family tree of dyke connections. They are lesbian lists. I want to document our symbolic inheritances, and celebrate our visionary writers and artists. I want to stitch pleasurable new connections between generations of dykes who have so much to learn from one another. I know what a privilege it is for me to make my living as a lesbian artist. My quilts are my way of explaining how grateful I am to the dykes who came before, like Jane, who carved that space out through lesbian and feminist consciousness raising, protesting, squatting, partying and creating lesbian feminist cultures. 

The bookcase and conch shell alongside Mother Maiden Crone (2022). Tufted wool, rug backing, and rug glute. Created with the support, guidance, and expertise of textile artist Alena Ruth Donley, rug tufting expert and founder of MCR Tufting workshops thanks to a DYCP grant. Photo courtesy of Alana Lake, Sarah-Joy Ford, and Cassinelli Mills.

Cieslik: One of my other favorite quilts featured in the exhibition is Mother Maiden Crone (2022). You specifically cite how this work explores the distinctly pre-Christian trinity symbol of the triple goddess, as well as the active deconstruction of goddess culture and the “mythic appropriation of women’s reproductive power through the unholy trinity” by Mary Daly. Can you share more about what this deconstruction looks like in this textile? How does the piece explore and celebrate the various parts of our lives as lesbians, and the sacredness of dykes?

Ford: This is the first time this tufted rug will be shown on the floor, opposed to on the wall. A little nod to Harmony Hammond. The work is part of my ongoing obsession with rabbits explored in my last two solo shows: Hare at Bobinska Brownlee Gallery, London in 2023 and Rabbit at Bury Art Museum in 2024. 

The rug depicts the enigmatic symbol of the three hares that has appeared in sacred sites across the Middle East, Europe, East Asia and the UK. They share three ears between them, connected in an infinite loop. It appears in particular density across South Devon churches especially in and around Dartmoor, known locally as The Tinners Rabbits which was used as an emblem for the tin mining craftspeople of the area. With family roots in Devon, me and my Grandma Jean like to visit churches with binoculars to find the hares carved into old churches. 

A symbol in use well before the Christian trinity, these could be carved by trades people into churches in the less visible spots, like the roof. The hare, like women has been a hunted animal – both burnt in the flames of a world shifting from moon worship to sun worship, matriarchy to patriarchy – from the mother, the maiden and the crone to the father, the son and the holy spirit. In some ways this work thinks through my own complex relationship to religion, and feminist spirituality. 

Mother, Maid, and Crone was very much a reaction to reading Gynecology and the Wicked Arcana by Mary Daly for the first time. I was enchanted by her radical-lesbian-feminist philosophies and her theological rage against the demolition of goddess culture, the mythic appropriation of women’s reproductive power through the unholy trinity. I really fell in love with her eccentric word weaving practices, and polemic rhetoric. 

However, the demonisation of ‘unnatural’ femininity, femmes and trans women in her texts is deeply at odds with my own femme identity, and politics. My femme identity is in solidarity with the many other rebellious forms of femininity in our LGBTQ+ family. In these dark times we must find the strength to gather in solidarity across difference, to defend the earth against the capitalist patriarchy of billionare-fascism. 

Dyke Wedding (2025), by Sarah-Joy Ford. Watercolor painting, digitally printed cotton, digital embroidery, hand embellished glass beads and sequins, wadding, plain cotton, long arm quilting, bias binding. Created with stitching support from Jessica Stringer-Fewtrill. Photo courtesy of Alana Lake, Sarah-Joy Ford, and Cassinelli Mills.

Cieslik: Dyke Wedding (2025) may honestly be my favorite, as a femmage to the work of artist, spiritualist, and late in life Catholic convert Pamela Coleman Smith who illustrated the Rider-Waite tarot deck. How are histories woven into the quilts, and rights to marry the people we love preserved in textiles? And how do people live on through quilts, and through their art?

Ford: Dyke Wedding a revisioning of the original poem by Jane Campbell, about her marriage to Red in 2025. It is such a beautiful and important poem, reflecting on the experience of being in love, and getting married as older dykes. It was written as a wedding gift for Red. Alongside my quilt is Jane Campbell’s artwork, the poem printed onto swirling stained glass and hand set in lead. This is my wedding quilt. 

Jane, and later Red both built their own homes on Dykeland. They have now left the land, starting a new chapter in their lives, and I wanted to make a wedding quilt to honour the strength of dyke love. My lovely wife Talin drove us to Wales for a DIY Dyke Wedding photoshoot with my iPhone. The landscape of the quilt is the view from Jane’s house, her ‘millionairess view’. The smoke twists from a dying fire. It is a goodbye to the dykeland as well. A hare sits between their feet. 

It is one of the biggest quilts I have ever made, and the most complex. It really was a labour of love. I wanted to create a monumental portrait of dyke womanhood, and dyke love. I wanted the excess of embellishment to express the depths of my love and gratitude for my friendship with Jane. Being with her has brought me so much joy, inspiration, and hope. 

This work is part of a larger series of forthcoming work: The Dyke Arcana, I will be creating in collaboration with the poet Roma Havers. Each portrait will be a quilted re-visioning of the Major Arcana in Pamela Coleman Smith's illustrations for the Rider-Waite Tarot deck. I have become increasingly fascinated with the artist, and her methodology for modeling the archetypes of the creative, powerful and queer women around her including actress Ellen Terry and director Edith Craig. 

I am delighted to be showing Dyke Wedding, and The Fool (modeled by my wife Talin, and our guinea pig Baby) again later in the year, as part of the inaugural exhibition of Cassinelli Mills. The exhibition will encourage the transcendental connections between this group and the fragmented and overlooked archive of artist Pamela Colman Smith (1878-1951). Cassinelli Mills is a new model of artist representation committed to supporting the living legacies of contemporary artist-women and non-binary artists from curating and art Historian team Vashti Cassinelli and Ella S.Mills. Details will be announced soon! 

A framed work in the exhibition by Sarah-Joy Ford. Photo courtesy of Alana Lake, Sarah-Joy Ford, and Cassinelli Mills.

Dykeland: Volume 1 will run through September 21, 2025. The exhibition is free.