
"Very difficult. Because the first thing Gilane [Tawadros, the director of Whitechapel Gallery] asked me was, "Do you have an archive?" And I'm like, "What is this? Archive? It's in drawers! Loads and loads of it! None of it is documented..." So I got a proper archivist to come in and document everything. The show contains about 40 years of work, even stuff from when I was at college."
"In September I went to pick up a piece of work that I had made in 1999, a beautiful book that I'd completely forgotten about. I had made it while on a Triangle artist workshop at Plas Caerdeon in Wales. I met fantastic people from all over the world: El Anatsui, Suzann Victor... I had made the book out of salt prints of flowers, on slate tiles. I also made up names of plants then wrote a story and got everybody to donate their voice to this story, in their own language."
Joy Gregory opened her first institutional survey at Whitechapel Gallery after receiving the 2023 Freelands Award. Catching Flies with Honey presents over 250 works spanning photography, film, installation, textiles, sound and digital media created across four decades. Gregory reimagines photographic practice, interrogates portraiture and listens to everyday patterns, rhythms and absences. A significant portion of her work existed undocumented in drawers, prompting professional archival intervention that revealed early college pieces and a forgotten 1999 book made during a Triangle workshop using salt prints on slate, invented plant names and multilingual contributed voices. A new commission has been two decades in development.
Read at The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
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