JOY GREGORY

Born 1959 in Bicester, England. Lives and works in London, England.

Joy Gregory, Gomera, 2010 (video still), digital video, PAL, 10 mins. Courtesy of the artist

Joy Gregory is a photographer and video artist of Jamaican parentage who was born and raised in the UK. She studied at Manchester Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art, London, graduating from the latter in 1986 with a Masters in Photography. Based in London where she also lectures in photography, Gregory works predominantly with photography and video using a range of techniques from digital to nineteenth-century print processes. In her work, Gregory maps social and political aspects of culture and history with a curiosity about and interest in cultural difference.

Gregory’s research-driven work since the late 1980s and early 1990s has seen her embark on series of ongoing works. In 1986, she began looking at the ‘Victorian’ pastime of assigning flowers with individual meaning, in particular as a means of conveying romantic messages from one person to another – resulting in her ‘Language of Flowers’ cyanotypes that she continues to produce. Series such as ‘Objects of Beauty’ (1992–95), ‘The Handbag Project’ and ‘Gloves’ (both ongoing since 1998) and ‘Girl Thing’ (since 2002) look at aspects of femininity from a sociopolitical perspective. A set of kallitype prints, ‘Objects of Beauty’, uses corsets and hair accessories as mnemonic symbols for ideals of beauty, and the ghostly blue silhouettes of bras, kitten heels and Barbie dolls in her ‘Girl Thing’ cyanotypes extends this theme to explore gender construction and the stereotypes embedded in these ‘feminine’ objects. ‘The Handbag Project’ and ‘Gloves’ series grew out of a residency in Johannesburg in 1998, at which time Gregory became fascinated by the luxury items associated with the privileged classes of South Africa’s apartheid era. In these distinctive photograms, handbags and purses are used as symbols of a particular society and moment in history, and gloves from the 1930s to 1960s are displayed in cabinets and tagged with museum-style labels that refer to events of the time.

Since 2002, Gregory has been conducting research into language endangerment. Taken up by the artist as a key indicator of the identity and historical development of a society, she notes that language has been subject to the effects of globalisation in a similar way that, due to increasing travel, traffic and ‘development’, biological diversity has been reduced. Language is our main way of making sense of the world, and by linking patterns in biodiversity with linguistic diversity, Gregory looks at the complex relationship between language, the environment and survival. Her current projects look at the dialects N/u, El Silbo and British Sign Language. N/u is one of the oldest, and most at risk languages; it uses click consonants and is only spoken by around 20 of the San people in the southern Kalahari Desert. El Silbo is a whistled language used on La Gomera in the Canary Islands, and is the subject of Gregory’s video Gomera (2010) shown in Sydney. Carrying much further than the spoken word, whistling was taken up by the island’s inhabitants as a way of conversing across distances as far as eight kilometres. This tongue is explored in mesmeric footage that charts a journey to the island, penetrates into jungle-like natural landscapes, and captures the beauty of the whistled exchanges.

puma.creative Mobility Award recipient.

Selected Solo Exhibition

2010 ‘A Retrospective’, Impressions Gallery, Bradford, UK
2009 ‘Sites of Africa’, This Is Not A Gateway Festival, London, UK
2005 ‘Accessory’, Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham, UK
2004 ‘Language of Flowers’, Zelda Cheatle Gallery, London, UK
2003 ‘Cinderella Tours Europe’, Archivo del Territorio Historico de Alva, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain

Selected Group Exhibitions

2008 ‘Becoming: Photographs from the Wedge Collection’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, USA
2007 ‘On Beauty’, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
2007 ‘Art & Emancipation in Jamaica’, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, USA
2004 ‘We Are The Camera’ Houston Center of Photography, Houston, USA
2001 ‘Africa Today, the Artist and the City’, Centre de Cultura Contemporania, Barcelona, Spain

Selected Bibliography

Annie Coombes, ‘Travelling Tales: Narrative and History in the Work of Joy Gregory’, Continental Drift, Europe Approaching the Millennium: 10 Photographic Commissions, Prestel, Munich, 1998, pp. 99–101
Cheryl Finlay, ‘To Travel in Her Shoes’, NKA Journal of Contemporary African Art, issue 21, 2008, pp. 48–59
Gillian Forrester, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2007, pp. 184, 186, 187
Rohini Malik-Okon, ‘The Handbag Project’, We Are The Camera, exhibition catalogue, Houston Center of Photography, Houston, 2004
Pepe Subiros, Africa, the Artist and the City, CCC B, Barcelona, 2001