Spanning four decades, this landmark exhibition brings together over 250 works encompassing photography, film, installation and textiles, all of which showcase and celebrate Joy Gregory’s inventive, culturally resonant and materially rich practice. Since the early 1980s, Gregory has been a pioneering force in contemporary photography, playing a critical role in its development nationally and internationally.
Her work explores identity, history, race, gender and societal ideals of beauty, while expanding photography’s aesthetic and material possibilities. Gregory employs a diverse range of media and methods, encompassing Victorian photographic techniques such as cyanotypes and kallitypes, as well as digital media and performance. Conceptually rigorous and visually seductive, Gregory’s work invites important reflection on power structures, representation and cultural memory. The exhibition’s title comes from the proverb, ‘you catch more flies with honey than vinegar’, a phrase that Gregory’s mother used to say to her. It encapsulates her approach to art as political ‘with a small p’; her intimate, visually pleasurable and poetic works encouraging nuanced rather than polemical discussion.
