Vanda

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 this piece, I wanted to reconstruct a window based on the Polish legend of Princess Vanda. In traditional storytelling and iconography, the princess defeated the invading Germans with her beauty. In defeat, the leader shouts: Vanda mari! Vanda terrae! Aeri Vanda import. (Vanda rules over the sea. Vanda rules over the earth. Vanda rules over the air) I reworked the imagery to show her as the sovereign of the Polish identity: never to be defeated by partition or men who believe she can be overthrown. The piece includes key elements of Polish sovereignty: in the background, photos of the Free City of Danzig the winter the Germans invaded and started World War II, the belts of soldiers under the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, and most personally, a letter my Polish great grandfather wrote to my great grandmother in 1925, telling her they could never return to Poland.