Retrieval

Retrieval is a mixed-media photography and collage series that recovers the feminine presence embedded in — and deliberately suppressed by — the iconography of medieval stained glass. Working with my own photography shot across locations in Southern and Northeastern France, layered with archival materials and found antique imagery, each piece returns the stained glass form to what it was architecturally designed to obscure: women not as symbol or margin, but as origin.

The project is driven by a question central to my broader practice: what forces have controlled what we carry forward, and what disappears — deliberately or quietly — when those forces decide a story, a life, or an entire culture does not merit preservation? In Retrieval, that question becomes material. Medieval stained glass is not neutral imagery — it is inherited iconography constructed within an institutional framework that systematically subordinated the feminine. These windows encoded a theology of erasure. My work enters that encoding and dismantles it from within.

The methodology is both archival and embodied. During month-long residencies in France, I worked on foot through the land — water crossings, liminal thresholds, sacred groves, ruins — photographing across shifting conditions of light and season. I research archival materials directly, documenting provenance and cultural context before anything enters the work; where provenance cannot be established, that anonymity itself becomes meaningful. My Polish, French, and Canadian heritage shapes the genealogical inquiry I bring to this land — this is not neutral documentary work, but a practice of reckoning conducted across inherited cultural memory. The resulting collages rebuild the stained glass form from the inside, restoring the feminine presence it was built to contain.

These are not reconstructions of a lost past. They are retrievals — what cultural memory might hold if it had never been severed from its source. The distinction matters because reconstruction implies working toward a known endpoint, while retrieval acknowledges that what was erased was never fully gone. It persisted at the edges of the record, in the places and old sites that outlasted the institutions designed to suppress it. My work gives form to what survived in those margins.

Retrieval has grown from years of archival research, field work across France, and sustained investigation into how war, religious authority, and systemic institutional power determined whose image — and whose agency — was permitted to endure. In surfacing these women not as historical footnotes but as structural forces, Retrieval proposes that recovery is not only an artistic act, but an ethical one.