Kraina (The Realm) (2026)

Kraina (The Realm) is an original piece of mixed media photography on wood from the Retrieval series. Rivers created this piece using her own photography shot in Western Canada and creative commons zero archival images from Biblioteka Narodowa and 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 Kraina, I reconstructed the iconic Arthurian myth of Morgana (Morgan le Fay) reimagined as a window into her embodiment of the land, its divine caretaker. In most versions, Morgana is presented as the dark sorceress who uses her cunning magic to seduce Arthur and lure other knights of the Round Table to take Camelot down. But, she did not come to the legends as a villain. Indeed, she entered the storyline as one of the original guardians of Avalon; a divine figure demoted to control the perception of her agency and power. Here, she is the realm, the powerful guardian of the mythical realm. Her agency and survival through hundreds of generations serves as a meassage that older, stranger forces exist beyond the constructs of king and country. She is not wife, victim or prize, but the sovereign. I titled the work Kraina — the Polish word for the mythical realm— as a nod to the Teutonic legends of Poland and my own cultural roots. The imagery begins with wycinanka – intricate cutouts from my Polish tradition. The cape is a pair of photos I shot of a massive forest cedar struck by lightening. The feathers around it come from a French feather headdress, a nod to Malory’s Le Mort d’Atrthur. The ox head sketches from the 16th century draw in the Hussar warrior tradition of Poland. The ancient forest behind sets the tone.