Joy Gregory: in conversation with Lou Mensah

Shade

Joy Gregory (b. 1959. Bicester, UK). Born in the UK to Jamaican parents, Joy Gregory’s work explores the impact of colonialism on global perceptions of beauty, memory, botany, health and traditional knowledge. As a photographer, Gregory has worked over decades in various media, including video, digital and analogue photography, film installation, Victorian print processes and more recently textiles; exploring photography as technology and as mode of artistic expression. She is interested in understanding how individuals and communities remember and interpret their history, particularly in relation to their connection to the land.

Joy & Lou discuss the themes of process and practice as they have developed throughout the artist’s four decade career. In June, Art on the Underground will unveil a new series of Joy’s artworks at Heathrow Terminal 4 Underground station - envisaging Heathrow as a portal of entry and exit. I spoke with Joy in February, as she embarked on her partnership with Hillingdon-based charity Refugees in Effective and Active Partnership (REAP) facilitating a series of photographic workshops with asylum seekers living in hotels in the Heathrow area, as well as a community group for Afghan women in Hayes and Harlington. These workshops will inform the creation of her artwork for Heathrow Terminal 4, giving space to the stories of newly arrived Londoners, displaced people whose realities are increasingly maligned and misrepresented. The work will offer an indelible trace of the cultures, languages and hopes which coalesce in London.

In the Autumn of 2025, Whitechapel Gallery will stage Joy’s first monographic exhibition, surveying a four-decade practice.

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