Łono (The Womb) (2026)

Łono (The Womb) 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 and The Cleveland Museum of Art. 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 Łono, I reimagined the Arthurian myth of Igraine as a window into her true power. She is the womb, the mother, but not just of Arthur — of the land. She cannot be denied her dominion. She is the dominion. I used two public domain archival pieces including a Byzantine halo from The Metropolitan Museum and a reliquary from The Cleveland Museum of Art alongside my own photography to retrieve her. She carries a Polish name to honour Teutonic legends and my roots.