Carry Gorney

(b. 1945, Leeds, England – Lives in Suffolk, England)

Second generation German-Jewish émigrée

Artist, writer, and psychotherapist Carry Gorney was born in 1945 in Leeds, England to German Jewish refugee parents, who left their native Berlin on their wedding day in 1937.

She recalls: ‘My father used to tell me about his life in Berlin before the war. I snuggled down into images from a pre-war Ashkenazi world, beginning the century before last. The nuggets of his life were tucked into music, always a tune, a song. I grew up listening to the symphonies of German composers and my own soul returned to Mittel Europa. The processions of musicians walking across our landscape held the beat of my father’s heart, the rhythm of his life, a language beyond words. Music had been the only constant in the chaos of his changing world.

We were raised between two languages. Our family inhabited an in-between world, they moved from a word in one language to a sentence in another. I never knew which language was which. My syntax still betrays my German background. German was the language of our nursery rhymes. We were lifted, held, hugged, tickled in German. Strong accents wrapped themselves around us like a blanket. We lived in a no-man’s land, an émigré country; the German world they created through the stories they told, the music they danced to, the embroidery they never finished and the friends who had disappeared.’

In 1966, when Carry graduated in Drama from Manchester University, she had already become a listener, and collector of stories; going on to make comics with young offenders, teaching improvisation at the Jacob Kramer College of Art, Leeds, then becoming one of the pioneers of the Community Arts movement in the 1970s, turning stories within local communities into plays and processions on the streets, where costumes, banners and scenery were made from discarded, scrap and recyclable materials. She later used video to initiate participatory programmes with Cable television, involving isolated young parents, and eventually developed this work with babies and their mothers in the NHS.

Burnt Histories: Thea, 2017

Collage with photography and textiles

30 x 40 cm

The Artist’s Collection

© Carry Gorney

Carry Gorney, Burnt Histories: Thea, 2017

Carry Gorney has observed that her ‘goal has always been to strengthen the threads which connect us across beliefs, across ethnicity and across time’. In her series of textile, mixed media and stitch collages, Burnt Histories (2017), she traces the exilic stories of her three great aunts, who fled Nazi persecution to settle in England: ‘homeless, stateless, carrying their embroidery and old photographs, the last fragments of their vanished world’. Her publication of the same title follows her memoir, Send Me a Parcel with a Hundred Lovely Things (2015), which considers how her own life was shaped by her refugee antecedents and their experience of displacement and reinvention.

The series includes each individual family member’s story, among them that of the artist’s mother, Thea, who is shown, aged seven, on her first day at school in Berlin, in a photograph on the left of the composition, printed on burnt and torn organza.

Burnt Histories: Rhea, 2017

Distressed image overlaid on frayed and torn embroidery and attached to hand stitched painted lace

35 x 32 cm

The Artist’s Collection

© Carry Gorney

Carry Gorney, Burnt Histories: Rhea, 2017

Rhea was one of the artist’s great aunts, who fled Germany with only a handful of photographs, embroideries and lace. This piece employs a double image: a photograph printed twice onto burnt organza and overlaid on frayed and torn cotton; distressed Tyvek (a unique, non-woven material) is then embellished with fragments of transfer foil and painted lace attached with hand stitching.

Burnt Histories, 2017

Collage with textiles and photography

41 x 58 cm

The Artist’s Collection

© Carry Gorney

Carry Gorney, Burnt Histories, 2017

This larger collage, which takes the series title, Burnt Histories, was completed after the individual tales and draws together these threads and fragments of the earlier stories, circling us back to the first generation of German-Jewish émigrés and the vestigial fragments of their lives. The piece comprises multiple layers of torn, painted German newspapers and photographs re-torn in strips to form seven layers, embellished with gold thread, Micah flakes, lace fragments and hand stitching.

An entry from the artist’s diary reads:

I imagine burnt out buildings - Dresden, Coventry, Berlin. I must paint a cityscape; my ancestors were urban. I ripped and tore all day. Seven layers in vertical strips to represent the broken buildings, the broken lives. Only the children between the crumbling and torn mass, pale little faces against the burning city …

Pieces of burnt synthetics, photo fragments, an image of debris … I iron down the black Micah fibres, rubbing with my fingers the charcoal and smearing paint on and scraping it off. It has layers, orange and blue but more brownish and greyish. Before applying the organza burnt pictures, I’ll stain the buildings …

If I stepped into my picture, I would become German and I would be gone.