Joy Gregory and the Whitechapel gallery won the eight annual Freelands Award.
In autumn 2025, Whitechapel Gallery will stage Joy Gregory’s first monographic exhibition, surveying a four-decade practice that has influenced generations of younger artists. Almost 100 works spanning analogue and digital photography, video, film installation, performance and textiles will highlight Gregory’s contribution to the development of photography in the UK.
Joy Gregory. Photo by Sunil Gupta
Born in the UK to Jamaican parents, Joy Gregory’s (b.1959, Bicester, UK) work explores the impact of colonialism on global perceptions of beauty, memory, botany, health and traditional knowledge. As a photographer, she 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. Since the 1980s, Gregory been at the forefront of exploring the wider cultural politics of identity, race and gender, alongside peers including Claudette Johnson, Veronica Ryan, Ingrid Pollard, Lubaina Himid and Sonia Boyce. These women artists each forged a radical and unique voice, but together came to embody a spirit of self-organisation and community that transformed the British cultural landscape.Her work explores the impact of European history and colonisation on global perceptions of identity, memory, folklore and traditional knowledge. She is interested in understanding how individuals and communities remember and interpret their history, particularly in relation to their connection to the land.
A graduate of Manchester Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art, Gregory has received numerous awards and has exhibited her work worldwide, participating in various festivals and biennales. Her work can be found in esteemed collections such as the UK Arts Council Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum, Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australia, and Yale British Art Collection.
A major new commission for the Whitechapel Gallery will bring together strands from the last twenty years of her practice, extending Gregory’s ongoing research into communities in the Kalahari and the descendants of indigenous and enslaved people in the Caribbean and Americas, tracing linguistic and folkloric connections. During the exhibition, Gregory plans to work directly with local young people from Tower Hamlets’ diverse diasporic communities through a series of creative workshops, as well as to curate a public programme exploring the evolution of photography in London since the 1980s when her practice first gained recognition.
'Celebrity Blonde Rita – the Vauxhall Vixen', 2007
Courtesy of the artist
Joy Gregory said: “Winning this award is a huge honour and supports a unique opportunity to present my work at Whitechapel Gallery, sharing my belief in the transformative power of photography with their many communities and providing validation for a career dedicated to pushing the boundaries of photography. My journey has been one of exploring the vast possibilities the medium offers, playing with its many forms, and using it to tell overlooked stories, bridge communities, and offer diverse perspectives on the world. I am so very thrilled and proud to be rewarded for what I regard as an unconventional approach. I hope that my work inspires others to embrace their own passion and innovative ideas.”
The finalists included:
The winner was chosen by a jury including Elisabeth Murdoch (Founder and Chair, Freelands Foundation), writer Olivia Laing, curator Elinor Morgan (Artistic Director, MIMA) and artist Ingrid Pollard (winner of the Freelands Award 2020).
Olivia Laing is an internationally published writer, whose most recent books are Everybody and Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency. She writes on art and culture for The Guardian, Financial Times and New York Times, and has written catalogue essays on a variety of contemporary artists.
Elinor Morgan is Artistic Director of MIMA, who won the Freelands Award in 2021 with Jacqueline Poncelet. A Teesside-based curator and writer, she has worked across the UK including with Outpost, Wysing Art Centre and Eastside Projects.
Ingrid Pollard MBE is a multi-media artist, photographer and researcher, whose influential work over many decades has used portraiture and landscape to explore social constructs such as Britishness or racial difference. She won the Freelands Award with MK Gallery in 2020, and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2022 for the exhibition.
