Tessa Boffin
1962-1993

Dyke activist Tessa Boffin was a photographer and performance artist. The first British lesbian artist to produce work in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic from a lesbian perspective. Boffin was an outspoken advocate of lesbian sexual freedom. Often working with her partner, Nerina Ferguson. Boffin's work celebrates queer gender-fuck as liberating for lesbians. Boffin was active in promoting the importance of lesbian photography. In 1991 she co-edited with Jean Fraser Stolen Glances: Lesbians Take Photographs, the first collection of its kind. As a photographic artist she worked to show specific aspects of the lesbian experience generally erased in mainstream culture. She re-worked famous heterosexual heroes such as the knight in shining armour into lesbian models, published in A Knight's Tale.