Szeptucha (The Whisperer)

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 Szeptucha, I reconstructed the Arthurian myth of Isolde reimagined as a window into her true power as a healer. In the most familiar version, Isolde and Tristan’s love story overshadows her profound healing abilities. This includes healing Tristan’s dragon wound. Tristan, of course, dies and Isolde follows in sacrifice. This piece lives in that tension between woman lost from heartbreak and a healer who gives her life in the attempt to save Tristan’s. Here, she is the whisperer: the powerful herbalist and conjurer of Polish folk tradition who speaks healing into existence. I titled the work Szeptucha — the Polish word this type of folk healer — as a nod to the Teutonic legends of Poland and my own cultural roots. The imagery begins with the two lunula – half moon symbols of protection in old Slavic traditions. I used the image of a medieval stirrup with its odd-shaped, hand-hewn metal. The shields are all medieval, with two of Polish origin. I used them as the mark of a different kind of warrior that guides us all through health, sickness, even death. I created the body from a Polish war cloak and spent an inordinate amount of time in the archives, trying ideas out, before I settled on the hair from a woven adornment with which Polish warriors embellished their horses. The rose hip photos are a nod to the herbalist tradition.