Żar (The Fire)

Mixed media photographic collage on cradled wood panel.

23x36x2"

Through the Retrieval series, I work against the inherited iconography of medieval stained glass, recovering the feminine presence it was built to suppress. Each piece layers my own photography — shot across locations in France — with archival materials, returning the stained glass form to what it was shaped to obscure: women not as symbol or margin, but as origin. These are not reconstructions of a lost past. They are retrievals — what cultural memory would hold if it had never been severed from its source.

In Żar (The Fire) I reconstructed the image of Guinevere as the fire that burns inside every woman that gives her agency over her life. Instead of treating this classic Arthurian woman as a victim of moral decay, I treat her as the sovereign force that burns kingdoms to the ground when men attempt to contain her instead of respecting her agency and power. I named the piece Żar, the Polish word for the fire that burns from within, to honour my roots.