"The title of the exhibition, which borrows from the proverb 'you catch more flies with honey than vinegar' that Gregory's mother would often repeat, reflects this visual seduction that the artist employs. Sometimes the artist's interest in beauty, a means of creating a sensuous experience, is more oblique and can be found in the laborious, embodied and physical experience of creating an image through cyanotypes, salt-printing or hours in the darkroom."
"I've always been really interested in the materiality of photography, and thinking of photographs as objects rather than just as images, because the substance the image exists on can be just as crucial as the image itself. When I'm using Victorian processes, such as with my series of cyanotypes or using Liquid Light, I have to use different types of paper which imbue the photographs with different emotions and feelings that make them into these really beautiful and precious objects,"
A Whitechapel Gallery retrospective frames beauty as an active method, using focus and medium to capture and maintain attention. Visual seduction enables engagement with challenging subjects through alluring aesthetics. The exhibition title, drawn from a maternal proverb, signals the strategic use of beauty. Material processes such as cyanotypes, salt-printing and darkroom labor foreground the embodied, physical creation of images. Photographs are treated as objects whose substrates and paper types carry emotion, imbuing images with preciousness. Beauty and femininity are interrogated as sites shaped by racialized and gendered ideas, forming part of the analytical inquiry.
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