Friends & Relationships: Nerina Ferguson.

Work: Her series of photographs Angelic Rebels: Lesbians and Safer Sex, 1989, addressed the issue of how lesbians are influenced by AIDS and how they could continue to enjoy sexual expression in the face of sensational press stories.
In a series of portraits, The Knight's Move, 1990, she looked at lesbian history and stereotyping. A photograph from this series is reproduced in Emmanuel Cooper, (1994), page 308.

Living and working in London at a time when lesbians and gay men were starting to call themselves "queer" and when sadomasochistic sex play moved out of the margins in this new queer culture, Boffin was an outspoken advocate of lesbian sexual freedom. Working with her partner, Nerina Ferguson, she developed a queer sex-show "Crucifixion Cabaret," performed in 1992 to great controversy. Tessa Boffin played a Centurion in full costume with red and gold cloak, and Nerina Ferguson took the role of a gold-painted naked slave.

Boffin was active in promoting the importance of lesbian photography, and in bringing it to a largely ignorant audience. In 1991 she co-edited with Jean Fraser Stolen Glances: Lesbians Take Photographs, 250 pages, the first collection of its kind. As a photographic artist she took the staged tableau-sequence formula, used most famously by gay photographer Duane Michaels, and molded it into a subtle language with which to articulate specific aspects of the lesbian experience generally erased in mainstream culture.
Some of her other work includes; Ecstatic Antibodies: Resisting the AIDS Mythology edited with Sunil Gupta, 1990, London: Rivers Oram Press, 200 pages book and Lesbian Looks, 1994, Scarlet Press.

In her 1991 tableau-sequence The Knight's Move she presents as lesbian heroes such iconic figures as the knight in shining armor, his leather-jerkined squire, Casanova and a lady-in-waiting, all played by women. Joining them is a lesbian angel, a fantasy figure that features in much of her work.

In the accompanying commentary in Stolen Glances, Boffin writes that she wants to place herself and her fantasy figures "into the great heterosexual narratives of courtly and romantic love: by making the Knight's Move--a lateral or sideways leap."
Unselfish with her time and energy, and eager to explore and support innovation in the lesbian arts, Boffin participated in the work of others far more generously than is usual with creative artists. She may be seen, for example, as one of the actors in short tableaux between the main features in Lesbian Lycra Shorts (1992), a collection of short films from independent lesbian filmmakers.

Sadly, her continuing creativity and her growing reputation as an artist were not enough to bring her contentment. In October 1993, Tessa Boffin took her own life, in the bathroom of her London home.

Greatest achievement: The first British lesbian artist to produce work in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, she was a founding member of the London-based AIDS and Photography group.        

Her Angelic Rebels: Lesbians and Safer Sex (1989), remains one of the most important photographic artworks to address AIDS from a lesbian perspective.

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