Joy Gregory: Catching Flies with Honey

Bringing together over 250 works created over four decades, Catching Flies with Honey marks the first major survey of Joy Gregory’s work. Through photography, film, installations and textiles, Gregory explores topics of identity, history, race, and societal ideals of beauty. Throughout her work, she uses specific processes – from Victorian photographic techniques, to digital media and performance – to reflect on how structures of power become embedded within societies, shaping the possibilities of the world we collectively inhabit. 

The exhibition will bring together key series spanning Gregory’s career, including Autoportrait (1990), a pivotal body of self-portraits exploring questions of beauty, exoticism and exclusion; The Handbag Project (1998–present), an ongoing study of luxury symbols of femininity through handbags owned by women during the apartheid era in South Africa; and Memory and Skin (1998), a multimedia installation combining photography, film, sound and gathered objects to examine the Caribbean as a layered landscape shaped by colonial legacies, cultural contradictions and hidden histories. These works will be presented alongside further pieces originating from Gregory’s extensive journeys across Sri Lanka, the Caribbean and Europe, as well as a newly commissioned film shot in South Africa’s Kalahari Desert, created as part of a 20-year collaboration with the Indigenous community whose ancestors spoke the now-moribund N|uu language.

Biography

Joy Gregory is a graduate of Manchester Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art. She has developed a practice which is concerned with social and political issues with reference to history and cultural differences in contemporary society.

As a photographer she makes full use of the media from video, digital and analogue photography to Victorian print processes. In 2002, Gregory received the NESTA Fellowship, which enabled her the time and the freedom to research for a major piece around language endangerment. The first of this series was the video piece Gomera, which premiered at the Sydney Biennale in May 2010.

She is the recipient of numerous awards and has exhibited all over the world showing in many festivals and biennales. Her work is included in collections including the UK Arts Council Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia, and Yale British Art Collection. She currently lives and works in London.

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