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 more quiet viewing of our current exhibition, Joy Gregory: Catching Flies with Honey. Free of charge, our Relaxed Hours are suitable for anyone disabled, neurodivergent or with additional sensory needs. We also welcome early years families.

As part of our Relaxed Hours we welcome you to join Freya Gascoyne for a Paper Bead Making Workshop. This will be held in the Common Rooms between 12:30-4:30pm and is suitable for all ages and abilities. Together, we will write and draw our hopes and wishes for the world onto strips of recycled paper that we roll into paper beads. 

A Chill Out space with low lighting, soft furnishings and books will be available. As always, you’re welcoming to borrow the following access supports from the gallery;

• 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.

Freya Gascoyne is an interdisciplinary artist working across painting, writing, workshop facilitation and arts-research. They have exhibited across the UK and Italy, curated exhibitions with communities including the Museum of Transology, and are published in t’ Art’s ‘Between Queer Teeth’ anthology. An exploration of identity and belonging, often in relation to queerness and gender, underpins much of their practice.

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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