Joy Gregory

Probably going to pilates this morning. I think it's nice going to a class where, I don't know, it's mainly women, nobody really cares because it's so early in the morning. And everybody laughs. You look at the next person who's trying to stretch your arms over something, and they're getting all twisted up. And we all collapse on the floor laughing.

I think photography is very important and interesting because it's accessible to so many people; it’s creative form that everyone can relate to. I used to be shocked at the number of people who would turn up for photography shows, and it's because nobody feels intimidated. It's something [people] have grown up with, something they do themselves, especially now. I mean, I just think all the way through from when I first started in the ‘70s, right the way through, it's always been the go-to. Everybody's familiar with a family album, everybody's familiar with now taking pictures on their phone, doing Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, everything. It's how people connect. So if you have an exhibition which is about photography, everybody’s got an opinion.

I've always made pictures of plants. I started off doing a thing called Language of Flowers, which is basically using a Victorian printing process, very influenced by Anna Atkins, to talk about a Victorian language of connection. Every plant had a meaning. So they were objects to start off with, and then to maybe print on wood, some special paper. So instead of it just being about the image, it actually became about something you could hold in your hand and something that would connect you.
I think much later on I started looking at Hans Sloane and how plants were used as currency in the 18th century, and how they have travelled around the planet. So, I always used to think of tomatoes as being associated with Italy and Spain, but they’re actually from Latin America. Breadfruit, which is a staple for my family in Jamaica, was actually from the South Sea Islands, and it was brought up to feed the slaves. Within the plants, there's also all these amazing stories to do with migration and colonialism. But in the work that I've made for Art on the Underground, it really is about how plants nourish us. And I think even just looking at plants or having plants around you in the home, when you can't have a pet, you can at least have a plant.

(Laughs) There’s no more children in London at the moment. Everything’s so expensive.

Heathrow Terminal 4, to me, is so glamorous. I remember seeing people like David Bowie there in the newspaper. Then I thought about travel and the other side of itt. I just thought a lot of people in the UK, but especially in London, actually come from somewhere else. And it's like, why are we demonising people who are actually us? So I discussed maybe working with asylum seekers or migrants. There's a hotel which is near Heathrow that houses asylum seekers while they're waiting for their cases to be heard and processed. I think we started off by going to a community group there.
The thing that struck me most was that all the places of leisure and pleasure you think of in a hotel, like the bar, the restaurant, etc.—they’re all boarded off there. There's no access to any of that.There's no cooking of food allowed. In what would have been the kitchen area, it was just banks and banks of microwave meals, and rows and rows of microwaves. I just thought, one of the things that’s a great comfort to all people who've come from somewhere else is to find something that they recognise, and usually it's food.
I remember growing up, my parents didn't go home very often. But then they would come back with like a mango or, I don't know, an avocado or something, and it would be the taste of home. I think in that way food feeds your soul. That's where the full idea of the exhibit came from.

Yeah. We did run these photographic workshops doing things like lumen prints and cyanotype printing. What was most significant was there were sometimes almost a hundred people who would come to these workshops. And it really was just an opportunity to sit and chat with each other, because I think normally they just stay in their room because there isn't anything, there's nothing in these spaces.

I think for me, home is a place where you feel safe and where you feel you can be yourself. I don't think it has to be a physical place; it has to be where you are comfortable.

I think by suggestion. With this work, what I did was lots of interviews and tried to get a sense of what they thought was important to them in terms of home. And food that they remembered or that made them think about home. Spices are key. They might cook exactly the same dish. Well, they call it the same name, but it isn’t the same. Like biryani. Biryani is the most popular dish. But the way in which each person, community or region would cook it would be completely different. Just the names of spices conjure up colour, smell, taste, and also memory. My dad used to like hot peppers and stuff, but when my mum was cooking, it was that smell of coconut rice.

I think anything with paprika. My mum used to make these Jamaican patties, which I probably ate so many of as a child, with paprika. I've just come back from Athens and they use it quite a lot on different things. For example, they have this wonderful dip that's made from lentils with lemon juice and onions, and then sprinkle it with paprika.

I stopped in Sri Lanka, and I think I came back with a bag full of cardamom to make cardamom porridge.

I went to South Africa and stayed with a friend of mine who has a print studio. I felt a bit jealous because it had been ages since I've been anywhere near a printing press. And I just thought, God, it'd be really great to do something with that. So that's what I did. I came back with this pile of prints and used that as the basis. For this project, I realised that when you make prints of plants, they don't look like the plants, so it's a bit more abstract. I used a lot of collage for the poster that we did for the map. We also used poetry, so it's a mixture of text, spices, and these images together. It's twenty-four big billboards, and I think it will look really, really, beautiful.

I think the thought of leaving people behind but not being able to go back. When my parents left Jamaica, economically they couldn't afford to go back, but they couldn't not go back because they'd put other people in danger.

 I've got a show coming up at Whitechapel; I’m trying to make a film. I'm trying to put everything in place. I've been working with the subjects for the last twenty years in the Kalahari. I suppose what I'm really interested in with this piece of work is looking at the idea of descendants and the impact of colonialism across hundreds of years on the everyday lives of people now. I'm working on a symposium that's happening at the V&A, which I'm doing with the Paul Mellon Foundation. I've been doing things like that. But I think it's mainly getting ready for the show at Whitechapel.