In her photograph-based practice since the 1980s, Joy Gregory has combined visual lyricism with historical inquiry.1 Frequently poetic and formally elegant, her works also reflect a sustained engagement with art history, especially with the ways in which identity and representation have been shaped by colonial and gendered power.2 Associated with the Black British Arts Movement alongside artists such as Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid and Ingrid Pollard, Gregory has consistently challenged the visual frameworks through which Black femininity has been pictured, classified and defined.3

Flowers recur throughout Gregory's work. Conventionally aligned with femininity, they are never merely decorative in her practice, but function as complex cultural agents.4 Series such as The Invisible Life Force of Plants (2020), Objects of Beauty (1992-95) and Fairest (1999-2010) use floral imagery to probe the intersection of beauty, power and historical violence.5 In The Invisible Life Force of Plants, Gregory uses cyanotype and lumen processes, techniques historically entangled with colonial botany, to register what she describes as the aura of plant specimens and to situate domestic flora within longer histories of empire.6 Objects of Beauty returns to Victorian photographic methods, including the kallitype process, to interrogate racialised ideals of femininity and the legacies of ethnographic display.7 Across these works, the flower occupies a paradoxical position: seductive and refined, yet implicated in systems of commerce, classification and control.

This ambiguity is distilled in Magenta and Green (Dancing with Tulips) (1985).8 The image draws upon the tulip's dense European history following its introduction from the Ottoman Empire into sixteenth-century Holland, where it became a marker of status during the Dutch Golden Age.9 Immortalised in seventeenth-century Dutch still-life painting and entangled in the speculative economy of tulip mania in the 1630s, the flower functioned both as an emblem of refinement and as a sign of economic volatility.10 In painting, it signified beauty and transience; in moral discourse, vanity and excess.11

Gregory mobilises this history while transforming the conventions of still life through movement. Combining still life and self-portraiture, she presents not only a composed vase of tulips, but also the blurred trace of their motion as she swings them through the air.8 The camera records this gesture as an arc across the frame. Her raised arm cuts diagonally across a green-draped table, while the vase at the left stabilises the composition. The image oscillates between stillness and movement, order and disruption. Through this apparently simple gesture, centuries of pictorial restraint are unsettled.

The blur is central to the photograph's meaning. Although photography has often been aligned with clarity, legibility and possession, Gregory reclaims blur as a strategy of refusal. This is an anti-portrait: she turns her face away from the camera, withholding access and denying the expectation of visibility. Gesture replaces likeness; movement becomes the site of identity. The tulips, once symbols of cultivated femininity, are reconfigured as extensions of the body: volatile, self-directed and alive.

In this sense, Magenta and Green (Dancing with Tulips) operates as a self-portrait not of disclosure, but of displacement. The figure resists capture and asserts selfhood through motion rather than appearance. The photograph's formal economy intensifies its conceptual force: presence is asserted precisely through evasion.

This language of refusal runs throughout Gregory's practice. In Memory and Skin (1998), fragile materials register traces of diaspora and personal history, linking bodily experience to broader narratives of migration.12 Language of Flowers explores systems of coded communication that historically concealed desire and reinforced social hierarchies.13 In The Blonde (1995-99), Gregory stages herself against Eurocentric ideals of beauty, using costume and performance to expose their constructed nature.14 Each project begins with a familiar visual language, still life, portraiture, fashion, botanical imagery, and reworks it to reveal its ideological underpinnings.

Gregory's strategies resonate with contemporaries who have similarly interrogated race and gender through self-representation. Carrie Mae Weems, in The Kitchen Table Series (1990), reclaims the domestic interior as a site of agency and self-definition.15 Lorna Simpson, in Guarded Conditions (1989), fragments and repeats the Black female body, pairing image with text to refuse visual consumption.16 Gregory's approach is distinct yet aligned: where Simpson fragments, Gregory blurs. In both cases, the viewer's desire for clarity is deliberately unsettled.

Magenta and Green (Dancing with Tulips) also recalls the strategies of Francesca Woodman. In Self-Portrait with Flower (1977-78), Woodman stages disappearance through motion and partial concealment.17 Gregory extends this lineage but shifts its emphasis: disappearance becomes defiance. The tulips move not toward erasure, but toward agency; their motion transforms uncertainty into assertion. Read in this context, Gregory's photograph converts still life into moving performance.

Within British art, Gregory's work stands in dialogue with Lubaina Himid and Sonia Boyce. Himid's Naming the Money (2004) reinserts erased African figures into eighteenth-century European visual culture.18 Boyce's Missionary Position II (1985) deploys theatricality to critique imposed identities.19 Gregory shares their critical concerns, but her method is one of destabilisation rather than insertion: she disrupts the pictorial order itself.

The significance of Magenta and Green (Dancing with Tulips) lies in this economy of means. A single gesture collapses centuries of symbolic meaning. The stillness of Dutch painting dissolves; the colonial commodity becomes unstable; the emblem of delicate femininity is reimagined as an instrument of resistance. The image invites us to understand beauty as historically constructed and identity as contingent, embodied and unfixed.

Across Gregory's practice, flowers are never innocent. They carry the residues of empire, the weight of gendered expectations and the exclusions of the canon.4 In Magenta and Green (Dancing with Tulips), these histories are set in motion. Gregory does not pose with flowers; she activates them. She does not conform to pictorial tradition; she unsettles it. What emerges is a self-portrait of refusal: a declaration that the Black female subject, long constrained within European art, will not be contained, classified or stilled.

Endnotes
1. Whitechapel Gallery, Joy Gregory: Catching Flies with Honey, press release and exhibition materials, 8 October 2025 to 1 March 2026.
2. Whitechapel Gallery, Joy Gregory: Catching Flies with Honey, exhibition materials; Autograph ABP, Joy Gregory: Autoportrait.
3. Whitechapel Gallery, Joy Gregory: Catching Flies with Honey, exhibition materials.
4. Joy Gregory, Language of Flowers and related project materials, joygregory.co.uk; Whitechapel Gallery, Joy Gregory: Catching Flies with Honey, exhibition materials.
5. Joy Gregory, The Invisible Life Force of Plants, Objects of Beauty and Fairest, project materials, joygregory.co.uk; Whitechapel Gallery, Joy Gregory: Catching Flies with Honey, exhibition materials.
6. Joy Gregory, Breath is Invisible: The Invisible Life Force of Plants, joygregory.co.uk.
7. Autograph ABP, Joy Gregory: Autoportrait, autograph.org.uk/commissions/joy-gregory-autoportrait.
8. Autograph ABP, Joy Gregory: Autoportrait; Whitechapel Gallery, Joy Gregory: Catching Flies with Honey, exhibition materials.
9. Mariët Westermann, The Art of the Dutch Republic 1585-1718 (London: Laurence King, 1996).
10. Anne Goldgar, Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
11. Westermann, The Art of the Dutch Republic, discussion of floral symbolism in Dutch still life.
12. Joy Gregory, Memory and Skin, joygregory.co.uk/project/memory-and-skin/.
13. Joy Gregory, Language of Flowers, joygregory.co.uk; Whitechapel Gallery, Joy Gregory: Catching Flies with Honey, exhibition materials.
14. Joy Gregory, The Blonde (1995-99), discussed in Whitechapel Gallery, Joy Gregory: Catching Flies with Honey, exhibition materials.
15. National Gallery of Art, Carrie Mae Weems: The Kitchen Table Series.
16. Tate, Lorna Simpson, tate.org.uk/art/artists/lorna-simpson-1774.
17. Francesca Woodman Estate and Tate materials on Francesca Woodman, including Self-Portrait with Flower (1977-78); The Photographers' Gallery exhibition materials on Francesca Woodman.
18. Tate, Lubaina Himid: Naming the Money (2004), collection record and related materials.
19. Tate, Sonia Boyce: Missionary Position II (1985), collection record and related materials.