Feminine art of seduction

Women have always used their feminine charms to get attention. Beauty seduces. Cerebral contributions come later.

Rather than use strong-arm soapbox tactics to convey her messages, Joy Gregory employs beautiful images to entice and introduce her, sometimes uncomfortable, subjects. And what better vehicle than the handbag, the ultimate badge of flippant femininity?

Gregory's handbags (pictured) are first and foremost beautiful objects. But their attraction belies an ugly heritage - of colonial decadence and apartheid South Africa where Gregory found them, in their hundreds, unused and gathering dust in junk shops as an unsightly era was abandoned. Rather than glamourise them, she has chosen to take a truer imprint - letting the sun ghost the images onto silver nitrate treated paper - capturing distressed echoes and literal historical traces.

Like her handbags, the other prints in the collection - her queens, lost histories and blondes - share this didacticism. They are beautiful in their own right but reveal traces of wider historical and social concerns on closer analysis. Blonde - essentially a fun and flirtatious dismantling of an icon (literally, with strands of hair in peroxide-filled phials) - looks at the universality of the modern blonde, while Queens highlights history's over-looked heroines.

Amid all this oestrogen, Gregory's Lost Histories - smaller, quieter visual narratives of Caribbean landscapes - feel a little displaced (although we later learn they refer to the artist's own cultural traces). But, like a catwalk model with not much to say, we're more than prepared to forgive the oversight and surrender to simple beauty.

Joy Gregory: Traces
Until May 4, Zelda Cheatle Gallery, 99 Mount Street W1, Tue to Fri 10am to 6pm, Sat 11am to 4pm, free.

Tel: 020 7408 4448. Tube: Green Park