Joy Gregory: Catching Flies with Honey

Our Autumn exhibition for 2026 brings Joy Gregory’s first major survey show to Arnolfini. 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 (b.1959, UK), winner of the eighth annual Freelands Award and one of the UK’s most innovative artists working with photography today has been a pioneering force in contemporary photography, playing a critical role in its development nationally and internationally. Gregory’s work explores identity, history, race, gender and societal ideals of beauty, while expanding photography’s aesthetic and material possibilities, encompassing Victorian photographic techniques such as cyanotypes and kallitypes, as well as digital media and performance, inviting important reflections on power structures, representation and cultural memory. Catching Flies with Honey includes pivotal self-portrait series’ such as Autoportrait (1990), alongside explorations of beauty and gender in The Handbag Project (1998–present) and Girl Thing (2002–2004); works originating from Gregory’s many journeys across Sri Lanka, the Caribbean and Europe; her playful and piercing meditation on racialised standards of beauty in The Blonde (1997–2010), and the expansive multimedia work Memory and Skin (1998) – which Gregory has described as a ‘story-telling space for the past, present and future; the personal and political’ – and her newly commissioned film, shot in the Kalahari Desert, South Africa (part of a 20 year-long collaboration with the indigenous community whose ancestors spoke the now-moribund language of N|uu). The exhibition is organised by Whitechapel Gallery , London, with Arnolfini, Bristol. Joy Gregory: Catching Flies with Honey has been generously supported by Freelands Foundation. The exhibition is part of Bristol Photo Festival 2026. Read more Toggle Photography