Carry Gorney, b. 1945, Leeds, England – Lives Suffolk, England)
Artist, filmmaker, writer and psychotherapist Carry Gorney was born in 1945 in Leeds, England to German-Jewish refugee parents, who left their native Berlin in Germany on their wedding day in 1937. She has worked in community arts and video since 1968 and among many initiatives, developed the use of video for community participation with groups including mothers, adopted teenagers, and new parents, observing that her 'goal has always been to strengthen the threads which connect us across beliefs, across ethnicity and across time'. Her series of textile, mixed media and stitch collages, Burnt Histories (2017), traces the exilic stories of her three great aunts, who also 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.
