Bristol's Arnolfini is giving Joy Gregory her first major survey. 'Catching Flies with Honey' opens on 17 October 2026 and runs through 7 February 2027, anchoring the Bristol Photo Festival with more than 150 works spanning four decades of the British artist's practice.

The exhibition originated at Whitechapel Gallery, where it ran from October 2025 to March 2026. For Bristol, it brings together photography, film, installation and textiles, tracing Gregory's work since the early 1980s as a pioneering force in contemporary photography. Key series include the self-portrait project 'Autoportrait' (1990), the long-running 'The Handbag Project' (1998 to present), 'Girl Thing' (2002-2004) and the multimedia 'Memory and Skin' (1998), alongside journeys across Sri Lanka, the Caribbean and Europe.

Gregory's title borrows a saying repeated by her mother — that honey catches more flies than vinegar — and the show takes it as method: art that is political with a small p, intimate and visually rich rather than polemical. Her materials range from Victorian processes like cyanotypes and kallitypes to digital media and performance, and the Bristol edition includes a newly commissioned film shot in South Africa's Kalahari Desert, part of a two-decade collaboration with an Indigenous community whose ancestors spoke the now-moribund N|uu language.

Identity, race, gender, beauty standards and cultural memory run through the work, including the playful and piercing meditation on racialised beauty in 'The Blonde' (1997-2010). The Bristol Photo Festival, running 14 October to 15 November, pairs the Arnolfini survey with exhibitions including George Hallett's 'Home & Exile' and a Gaza photography archive at Albion Dockside.