The Morrigan

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 The Morrigan, I wanted to reconstruct a medieval cathedral rose window replacing the traditional patriarchal iconography with the powerful goddess of fate from the Celtic tradition. I chose the middle figure, which I shot in 2019 at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, as the focus point. Horse saffrons from medieval Scotland and Poland encircle the Morrigan, punctuated by the lunar cycle. Layered in between are decaying winter leaves and the magical mondara flower. In the next layer you’ll find hazy pastoral scenes of spring and the mare that I shot with homemade filters and an overlay of stag skulls and horns from 19th century Scotland. Finally, the brick which encases the window comes from photos I took of cathedral walls in Paris.