Second generation German-Jewish émigrée

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.