Mogiła (The Grave)

Mixed-media photographic collage on a cradled wood panel.

23x36x2"

In Mogiła, I reimagined the Arthurian myth of Hellawes as a window into her true power. In Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, she serves as a powerful sorceress and Lady of Castle Nygurmous, obsessed with Lancelot to the point of trapping and testing him. She is the warning, dead by heartbreak when Lancelot outsmarts her. Yet, hundreds of years earlier she began as the ancient Norse goddess Hel, the great psychopomp and keeper of the passage between the living and the dead, only demonized by men who could not control her.

So, here, she is the grave: not a woman undone by love, but the power inside every ending that cannot be bargained with, outlasted, or refused. I titled the work Mogiła — the Polish word for a burial mound — as a nod to the Teutonic legends of Poland and my own cultural roots. It carries more weight than the word “grave.” It is the dead made visible in the landscape, reshaping the terrain around it – a sort of womb. Life begins with the womb and ends with the grave, revealing the singularly feminine act of transforming one form of life into another. No story constructed will ever change that.