Joy Gregory was born to a Jamaican family in Bicester, Oxfordshire, England in 1959. She studied at Manchester Polytechnic and completed her MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art in London in 1998. Gregory's notable career spans digital and analogue photography, video, traditional Victorian printing techniques, and textiles, in which she addresses social, political, and cultural issues, including beauty's relation to race, gender, and social justice.
Artist and photographer, Joy Gregory was born to a Jamaican family in Bicester, Oxfordshire, England on 7 November 1959. She studied at Manchester Polytechnic and then completed her MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art, London in 1998. In her early years as a Black artist, Gregory struggled for recognition due to the white art community's biased expectations. She recalled being asked to contribute to a Black art exhibition as a student, but her photographs of interiors and still lifes were rejected for not being ‘Black enough’ (Art Fund interview). Gregory's work spans digital and analogue photography, video, traditional Victorian printing techniques, and textiles. She addresses social, political, and cultural issues, including beauty's relation to race, gender, and social justice. During the 1980s and 1990s, Gregory focused on themes of identity, predominantly through self-portraits. Her Autoportrait series (1989–90) highlighted the scant representation of Black women in the fashion world. In her Objects of Beauty series (1992–95, examples in the V&A collection), she questioned the pressures that the fashion and beauty industries place on women to adhere to conventional standards of beauty and youth, regardless of their natural attributes, exploring the idea that every object is influenced by cultural context and that beauty is a personal perception, not a universal truth. This series featured everyday items, such as corsets, tape measures and hairpins, used by women in efforts to enhance their appearance. Each item was individually photographed and rendered using the calotype method, a 19th-century technique characterised by its nuanced tonal variations. This presentation not only elevated these everyday objects, but also endowed them with a near-iconic presence, making them, ‘ironically […] beautiful in their still-life guises’ (V&A website).
In 2001, the Organisation of Visual Arts in London commissioned Gregory's series, Cinderella Tours Europe (Government Art Collection), exhibited at Pitzhanger Manor Gallery in Ealing in the same year. Comprising 19 photographs, it offered a fresh insight into the Cinderella fairy tale, presenting a pair of golden shoes set against iconic European landmarks. Each image explored the notion of Cinderella as a Caribbean person, captivated by a romanticised Europe. The series stemmed from Gregory's earlier work, Memory and Skin, based on her interactions with Caribbean locals during a 1997 trip to Jamaica. In 2002, Gregory was awarded the NESTA Fellowship, enabling her to develop a project centered on language endangerment. In 2010, the Impressions Gallery, Bradford held Gregory's first extensive retrospective, titled Lost Languages and Other Voices, highlighting a range of her works, including the video piece Gomera (2008) and the landscape series Kalahari (2010). Through these pieces, Gregory investigated the intricate connections between landscapes, endangered languages, and indigenous knowledge. The work specifically championed the preservation of African native languages, with a particular focus on ‡ N|ul, the oldest extant language of South Africa, spoken by the San community. Notably, this language, once believed to have become extinct in 1974, is now spoken by a small group of individuals.
In 2022, Gregory was commissioned to create a piece for the exhibition In Plain Sight: Transatlantic Slavery and Devon at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery in Exeter. Her work, titled The Sweetest Thing, utilised textiles and embroidery, drawing inspiration from the museum's artifacts, most notably, the Combesatchfiel textile, dating from the 1750s, whose embroidered scenes included a well-dressed woman and a Black child holding a parasol. Gregory's creation explored the 17th and 18th-century sugar industry, incorporating cyanotype photograms of her hair to symbolise the sea and the Atlantic Middle Passage. To inform her work, Gregory photographed Devon locations linked to the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Her own embroidery then featured stately homes and scenes of enslaved people handling sugar, merging narratives from both continents. The tapestry's borders displayed figures in slave-restraints, juxtaposed with sugar shakers from the museum. Gregory commented, ‘I’m interested in the stark contrast of the lives lived in the grand houses in Devon [...] I see my job as an artist to create curiosity and bring histories together. I am making things of beauty to talk about ugliness’ (UAL website). Her recent series The Invisible Life Force of Plants centered on plants used for medicinal and culinary purposes. This collection featured cyanotype and lumen prints, with the latter capturing the plants' ‘breath’ by producing an aura around each specimen. This work was showcased in the Breath is Invisible exhibition at Westbourne Grove in London in 2020. In 2022 Gregory featured in Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s-Now at Tate Britain and in Squaring the Circles of Confusion: Neo-Pictorialism in the 21st Century at the Royal Photographic Society. Bristol. Gregory is an Associate Lecturer of photography at UAL's Camberwell College of Arts. In the UK public domain her work is represented in the Victoria and Albert Museum collection and the Government Art Collection.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Joy Gregory]
Publications related to [Joy Gregory] in the Ben Uri Library