Dunster, Flora (2025) Rewriting the Future: Tessa Boffin’s The Knight’s Move. British Art Studies, 27. ISSN 2058-5462
| Type of Research: | Article |
|---|---|
| Creators: | Dunster, Flora |
| Description: | This article focuses on the practice of the late photographer Tessa Boffin. I situate her work in the context of British art and politics as they were at the time of “queer” being reclaimed from a term of abuse in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and explore how she used photography to visualise what “queer” could mean from a lesbian perspective. The article centres on an analysis of Boffin’s series The Knight’s Move (1990), in which she rewrites the history of her queer present to include a lesbian past. While these photographs can be viewed as a precedent for an intersectional and exploratory understanding of queerness, I suggest that “the knight’s move” can also work beyond the series itself. I locate it as a strategy for bringing “queer” and “lesbian” together in our present, re-figuring both positions in relation to each other and in resistance to the gatekeeping around the meaning of each word. I argue for the knight’s move as a device that allows us to situate photographs not as historical remnants but as a vital site of community formation, thereby offering a way of working with Boffin’s oeuvre rather than on it. |
| Official Website: | https://britishartstudies.ac.uk/issues/27/tessa-boffins-the-knights-move/ |
| Publisher/Broadcaster/Company: | Paul Mellon Centre |
| Your affiliations with UAL: | Colleges > Central Saint Martins |
| Date: | July 2025 |
| Digital Object Identifier: | 10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-27/fdunster |
| Date Deposited: | 15 Apr 2026 12:17 |
| Last Modified: | 15 Apr 2026 12:17 |
| Item ID: | 26321 |
| URI: | https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/26321 |
| Licence: |
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