Carry Gorney (Born 1945, Leeds, England - Lives Woodbridge, Suffolk, England)
Burnt Histories, 2017
Ink drawings over painted layers of ripped German newspaper and Hebrew text. Photographs printed on burnt and damaged synthetics
41 x 58 cm
The Artist’s Collection
© Carry Gorney
Second generation German-Jewish émigrée
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.
