Igła (The Needle) (2026)

Igła (The Needle) is an original piece of mixed media photography on wood from the Retrieval series. Rivers created this piece using her own photography shot in Northeastern France and creative commons zero archival images from The Met Open Archives. Each element is hand cut and laid using analog collage techniques. Other elements include acrylic paint and medium. Artist Statement: 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 Igła, I reconstructed the Arthurian myth of Elaine of Astolat — more widely known as The Lady of Shalott — reimagined as a window into her true power. In the most familiar version, Elaine dies of heartbreak when Lancelot fails to return her love. Her body is set adrift down the river toward Camelot. Yet, she is also cast as an accomplished weaver, seamstress, and keeper of Lancelot’s shield. This piece lives in that tension between passive victim and sovereign force. Here, she is the needle: the instrument through which fate is threaded. She is the unseen commander in the lives of men. I titled the work Igła — the Polish word for needle — as a nod to the Teutonic legends of Poland and my own cultural roots. The ornate battle shield, with its figure suspended as if floating, serves as an homage to the legend’s original imagery and a deliberate subversion of it. I chose the background photography, taken at a lake near Orquevaux, France, for its fae-like quality that captures the liminal space where myth and reality blur.