Joy Gregory unveils billboard art project at Heathrow inspired by asylum seekers | Art

The UK needs more public art that confronts the major issues of the day, according to Joy Gregory, the award-winning artist who has just unveiled a new project at Heathrow airport inspired by more than 100 asylum seekers.

Gregory, who is known for her photographic work and won the £110,000 Freelands award recently, was commissioned by Transport for London (Tfl) to create 24 billboards mounted in the airport’s Terminal 4 underground station ticket hall.

The project – called A Taste of Home and consisting of print images of plants matched with poetry by Khaled Abdallah and Warsan Shire – was inspired by workshops that Gregory and Tfl ran with asylum seekers who were living in temporary accommodation near the airport.

“I think it’s a platform to actually discuss those ideas in a wider context,” said Gregory of public art. “Millions of people will come through and see it, and it’s really important to use those platforms to actually talk about things that are really important to us as a whole.

“But I also think that’s the subject [of the artwork] of what is very timely in terms of what’s happened this week in government: no more flights to Rwanda, and shutting down the [Bibby] Stockholm.”

Gregory said many of the asylum seekers she spoke to, who were from nations all over the world, felt trapped in a labyrinthine system that seemed designed to dehumanise them.

In December 2023, the Refugee Council estimated that more than 120,000 people were waiting on the outcome of their initial asylum claim, a situation described as “living in limbo”.

Through the workshops at the hostel where the participants were accommodated while their claims were processed, Gregory would ask – via a translator or Google Translate – what their first memory of a plant or flower was. “It would open up a whole conversation,” she said.

Gregory believes the location of the work – an easily accessible public location – is important.

The artist learned her craft on a commercial photography course at Manchester Polytechnic (now Manchester Metropolitan University) in the early 1980s, and the idea of using billboards to present A Taste of Home felt natural to her. “My training at Manchester was in communication, art and design,” Gregory said. “You can use those tools to actually talk to a very broad audience.

“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.”

An estimated 1 million people pass through the fourth terminal every month, but A Taste of Home is not the first time travellers in London have been exposed to Gregory’s work.

Last year, her art appeared on London Underground maps in the form of a floral print called A Little Slice of Paradise, inspired by the mini-gardens that staff cultivate at stations around the capital. The maps were highly sought after, and some copies eventually turned up on eBay.

Food became a major theme running through the two dozen pieces that make up A Taste of Home, with Gregory creating prints of garlic, saffron and fennel seeds.

She said: “Somebody who worked at the station came up to me yesterday and told me that their parents had come from Italy in the 70s and they said, ‘This is our story, this is my story.’”

“They really relate to it because it’s about food, because food is a thing that makes you think of home; food is home, in many senses.”

Eleanor Pinfield, the head of Art on the Underground, said: “Joy Gregory’s new commission is an exploration of nature, food and plants in our city, exploring the histories and futures of both those who have lived in London for generations and those newly arriving.”