It’s not every exhibition that comes with a reading list.  

Misleadingly dreary though that might sound, the lesbian bibliographies stacked inside the bottom drawer of a reupholstered telephone table as part of Sarah-Joy Ford’s vividly expansive Dykeland: Volume 1 are of a piece with its more celebratory sisters.  

A temporary tenant in the former home of Rossendale’s Hardman family, who amassed their capital in cotton and wool, Ford fits out what are now The Whitaker’s gallery spaces with domestic flourishes; her spirit animal, the rabbit, dashes around the hot pink circle of a rug emblazoned Mother Maiden Crone while, over the hearth, hang two crossed labryses – the double-headed axe of the Amazons co-opted as a signifier of lesbianism.  

Featuring new and older works and typically drawing upon crafting traditions, in particular those dismissed as woman’s work such as quilting, the pieces on display form part of a tactile textile conversation with the like-minded, like-titled unpublished poetry of Jane Campbell, Dykeland And Other Secret Islands. In conjunction with Campbell’s words, Ford brings to fruition a secessionist republic, delightfully at odds with the relentless regency of heteronormativity.  

Dyke Wedding, for instance, stitched through with the tenderness of Campbell’s wedding vow to her wife Red, proposes a new ideal of matrimonial bliss, stripped bare of promises of obedience and solemnised in an Edenic garden rich with golds and purples. Its design consciously echoes that of The Lovers in the deck of Pamela Colman-Smith’s Tarot. The divinatory promise of the Tarot, with its appeal to intuition as a path to understanding, also makes itself felt in Ford’s The Fool. Here, the central figure, also adapted from Colman-Smith, is modelled on Ford’s wife, Taln Aganian. Setting forth on a road to undiscovered territories, the nature of its promise is spelled out in nature’s language through the female morphologies of conch shell and pomegranate, the resonance of the latter redoubled by its association with Aganian’s native Armenia.  

More explicit in its declaration of independence from Emperor or King is Dykeland itself, a rectangular banner bearing the heraldry of a country at once both new and ancient, symbolised by the alliance of the owl and the pussycat. Here, Campbell’s words shape the lyric of an anthem of a nation that transcends geography, with its pledge ‘to share bread and honour’. In keeping with this, Escape Maps To Lesbian Utopia plots an emancipatory route from the high towers of patriarchal restriction, descending via a ladder of knotted scarves, each bearing the cartography of the once and future free state. The tethered pages of Ford’s silken atlas wittily suggest a paradoxical unbinding, a disregard for borders also implicit in her Other Secret Islands, a triptych of imaginary lands, each with its own presiding goddess.  

Books, of course, are maps of a similar kind, opening up uncharted worlds of possibility and imagination. The pink pages of Ford’s suggestions for further reading form a kind of appendix to a glass-fronted bookcase displaying the beginnings of a lesbian library teeming with the blueprints for other ways of living, as does her quiet insistence on a lexicon which overwrites the heteronormative with the queered, in references to ‘femmage’ and ‘investigaytion’. In doing so, she emphasises the cultural importance of honouring her community’s own traditions, laying down its own history.

 Dykeland‘s crowning achievement, perhaps, is this: while domestic in form, in conception it speaks of home on a wider scale, a commonwealth for women marginalised for loving women. In the meticulous nature of her research, unpicking the stitches in the tapestry of the official record, Ford demonstrates the way in which notes from the margins can become a library in themselves. 

Nor, apparently, does the story end here. The lyrical verses of Dykeland: Volume 1 more than justify its implied sequel. 

By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent

Main image: credit The Whitaker Museum and Art Gallery

 

Dykeland: Volume 1 is at The Whitaker in Rossendale until September 21, 2025. For more information, click here.