Chickweed, 2017

Joy Gregory’s work combines considerations of history, race and feminine beauty with a through-line of imagery representing flowers and plants. Her first major body of photographs was The Language of Flowers - a series of cyanotypes exploring the Victorian symbolism of flowers, inspired by memories of her childhood and the imagery of 19th century photographer Anna Atkins. She has used the cyanotype process ever since, for which she places objects on a coated paper that, once briefly exposed to a light source and then fixed, leaves a photogram ‘shadow’ of the object in iridescent blue. She has used the process throughout her artistic life, for instance, for Girl Thing, a series of cyanotypes of traditional objects of feminine beauty, and a similar salt print process for The Handbag Project, photograms of delicate vintage handbags once owned by white women in South Africa during the Apartheid era. Chickweed is a series of cyanotype photograms made in 2017, in an edition of 30. Each print is unique, made from a different sprig of chickweed. This is the second in a series of Autograph editioned prints, presented by Aperture, in support of Autograph and its 35 years of work in photography on the themes of race, rights and representation.

For a PDF of available works and pricing, email prints@aperture.org.

Cyanotype on Khadi paper (a hand-made cotton paper from southern India)
Image size: 5 x 7 inches
Paper Size: 15 x 10 inches
Edition of 30; each print is unique, made from a different sprig of chickweed
Signed and numbered by the artist on the front.

 

Joy Gregory is a graduate of Manchester Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art. She works internationally from her studio base in London. Her photographs have been collected  by the Tate Gallery and Victoria and Albert museums, London, and the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, USA, among others. She is the editor of Shining Lights, the first critical anthology of pioneering Black women photographers active in the UK during the 1980s and 1990s, published in fall 2023 in association with Autograph by Mack.