Relaxed Hours: Joy Gregory - Whitechapel Gallery

Relaxed Hours: Joy Gregory

  • Joy Gregory Language of Flowers

    Joy Gregory, Daucus Carota (Carrot) from the series ‘The Invisible Life Force of Plants’, 2020, Cyanotype. © Joy Gregory

Tue 17 Feb

Monday Closed
Tuesday 11am–6pm
Wednesday 11am–6pm
Thursday 11am–9pm
Friday 11am–6pm
Saturday 11am–6pm
Sunday 11am–6pm

Access Information

Access
Relaxed Hours: Joy Gregory

Join us for a sensory and low-light viewing of Joy Gregory: Catching Flies with Honey. Our Relaxed hours begin ahead of public opening hours and are suitable for anyone disabled, neurodivergent or with additional sensory needs. We are also welcoming early years families, parents and carers.

A Chill Out space with low lighting, soft furnishings with paper & pencils will be available. You’ll be able to borrow:

• Ear Defenders
• Ear Plugs
• Fidget Toys
• Magnifying glasses
• Wheelchairs (2 available)
• A Portable Hearing Loop

Tickets are free but please book to reserve a space.

Joy Gregory: Catching Flies with Honey, will be the first major survey show of the artist, Joy Gregory (b.1959, UK), winner of the eighth annual Freelands Award and one of the UK’s most innovative artists working with photography today.

Spanning four decades, this landmark exhibition brings together over 250 works encompassing photography, film, installation and textiles, all of which showcase and celebrate 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.

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