Mogiła (The Grave) (2026)

Mogiła (The Grave) 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 Statens Historiska Museer. 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 Mogiła, I reimagined the Arthurian myth of Hellawes as a window into her true power. In Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, she serves as a powerful sorceress and Lady of Castle Nygurmous, obsessed with Lancelot to the point of trapping and testing him. She is the warning, dead by heartbreak when Lancelot outsmarts her. Yet, hundreds of years earlier she began as the ancient Norse goddess Hel, the great psychopomp and keeper of the passage between the living and the dead, only demonized by men who could not control her. So, here, she is the grave: not a woman undone by love, but the power inside every ending that cannot be bargained with, outlasted, or refused. I titled the work Mogiła — the Polish word for a burial mound — as a nod to the Teutonic legends of Poland and my own cultural roots. It carries more weight than the word “grave.” It is the dead made visible in the landscape, reshaping the terrain around it – a sort of womb. Life begins with the womb and ends with the grave, revealing the singularly feminine act of transforming one form of life into another. No story constructed will ever change that. The black figure is that of an ancient holy woman, and the inclusion of a Viking spearhead pays homage to the goddess Hel. Although it is covered over in the piece, the paths in the photos connect to form the rune Gebo – the gift. In the ancient world, every exchange created a sacred knot between giver and receiver. It remains intact beneath the dark figure to signify the crossing from life to death. No one leaves unchanged. I chose the background photography, taken at a forest near Orquevaux, France, for its fae-like quality that captures the liminal space where myth and reality blur.