“I’m one of those artists that never really looks back, I’m always moving onto the next project. One of the great things about curating this show was being able to see how different creative threads have come together. There are things that you’d think were completely disconnected that actually have a lot in common. For …
“For me, it’s a really magical medium which is really about the 20th and 21st Century and it is the medium of now. And by now, I think only 40 years is quite a good have a retrospective. I’ve become more confident about my practice, and I spend most of my time actually doing my …
“Each work has led on to the next. My endangered language work in the Kalahari has been going on for decades, but then making that work in 1999 was part of me trying to make sense of it too. And the idea of self-portraiture, in Autoportrait, is also a really important part of taking pictures …
“Not having a gallery has been a freedom for me,” says Gregory. “I haven’t worried about what work is going to look like before I make it. A lot of artists complain that galleries are doing too many art fairs and will tell them they need a work for Art Basel or Frieze and insist …
“In an essay for e-flux Journal titled Beauty Is a Method, writer and academic Christina Sharpe asks us to consider “what beauty as a method might mean or do: what it might break open, rupture, make possible and impossible, how we might carry beauty’s knowledge with us and make new worlds.” In a new retrospective at Whitechapel …
“Don’t be normal. Don’t be normal ever!” Joy Gregory says with a throaty laugh. Known for her boundary-bending photography that tackles weighty subject matter with arresting beauty, the artist has spent 40 years pursuing a creative path that is uniquely her own – and anything but normal. Now, the fruit of that labour will …
“For an artist who has always been as concerned with listening as with looking, Joy Gregory’s first major retrospective feels less like a career survey than a continuing dialogue. Indeed, while the exhibition itself has been three years in the making and covers 40 years’ worth of work, Gregory says it has been more a …
“The visual artist Joy Gregory’s retrospective exhibition Catching Flies with Honey opens at the Whitechapel Gallery today. As an artist Joy explores identity, history, race, gender and societal ideals of beauty all while pushing the possibilities of photography and other media. She discusses her life and work.” Presented by Nuala McGovern, produced by Kirsty Starkey. …
“In Britain, it’s stereotypically assumed that the weather is an innocuous topic, free of controversy. Yet, depending on one’s circumstances, within its conviviality are less-than-comfortable thoughts and memories. Joy Gregory and composer Philip Miller’s 2021 video Observations: Rose is a slideshow mostly consisting of photographs of Jamaica’s luscious vegetation and the Caribbean Sea, in different …
“There weren’t many Black students at the Royal College of Art when Joy Gregory was a student in the 1980s, but she did study alongside artist and Blk Art Group founder Keith Piper, who was putting together a Black photography exhibition. “He asked me if I would submit some work,” says the 65-year-old artist. Piper had liked …