Award-winning artist Joy Gregory revealed a glorious new public artwork at Heathrow Terminal 4’s underground station this week, a commission for Transport for London.
A Taste of Home is inspired by more than 100 asylum seekers living in temporary accommodation near the airport who Gregory met during workshops she ran. It comprises 24 works, pairing ethereal prints of plants, seeds, herbs and spices, paired with poetry – quietly querying lines by the likes of Gaza-born Khaled Abdallah and 35-year-old British-Kenyan poet Warsan Shire. It is both a timely and timeless reflection on migration and movement, on ideas of departure and return, and of how we carry a sense of home with us.

Gregory, 64, won the 8th annual Freelands Award in 2023 – a retrospective of her work will be held at the Whitechapel Gallery next year as a result. Having trained in commercial photography in the 1980s, Gregory developed a conceptual photo-based practice that experiments with a variety of digital and analogue techniques and grapples with themes related to contemporary identity, difference and displacement. She is also the editor of Shining Lights, the first critical anthology to explore the groundbreaking work of Black women photographers in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s. Shining Lights was published earlier this year, to great critical acclaim.

Of A Taste of Home, Gregory has said: “Culture and art is something that unites us all; it’s something we can all get behind. I think it’s important that art is in a space like this and not gallery space, which is seen as hallowed and exclusive. Everybody off the street can come and have a look at this.”

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