Żar (The Fire) (2026)

Żar (The Fire) is an original piece of mixed media photography on wood from the Retrieval series. Rivers created this piece using her own photography shot in Orquevaux, France and creative commons zero archival images from The Cleveland Museum of Art. 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 Żar, I reconstructed the iconic Arthurian myth of Guinevere reimagined as a window into her embodiment of the sovereignty and the unbroken sacred flame that serves as the ultimate proof of right to rule. Throughout the Arthurian myths, Guinevere is portrayed as the harlot wife who beds Sir Lancelot and splits the kingdom over the betrayal. Finally, in Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, Guinevere is nearly burned at the stake after Lancelot is lured to her bed chamber by Mordred and others. Arthur orders her death. Lancelot saves her at the cost of the kingdom. But, Lancelot understood what Arthur could not: Guinevere was not an object to control. Honouring her line was the condition of his kingship. In creating her as the fire, I retrieve Guinevere as the sacred flame of the feminine which Arthur’s quest for power rejected. He chose his knights over true service to her lineage; his power over intimacy and trust required of a husband and wife; his ego over service to the greater good. Guinevere is the sovereign feminine, the flame that cannot be extinguished and instead burns kingdoms to the ground when those who rule refuse to do so in service to it. I chose each element carefully. From my own photography, I chose a background with a path leading to a mound to create a sense of a pyre. I also chose the wintery remains of wild field flowers for the fire, all shot in Orquevaux, France in December 2024. From the Cleveland Museum of Art archives, I pulled a bust of powerful French queen Anne de Bretagne, the only woman to serve as queen of France twice and a woman who devoted her life to the autonomy of her people. A woman of immense power, she understood better than most the treachery of public life and the intimacies of safeguarding identity. A Prussian powder flask sits at the center point of the piece, demonstrating the power fire contains to protect and destroy. I also pulled armour from Rudolf II for its knot work of interlaced, unbroken bands that have no beginning or end. On Guinevere, it marks the line through which all kingship flows and returns. It cannot be cut without destroying the whole. I titled the work Żar— the Polish word for the fire within — as a nod to the Teutonic legends of Poland and my own cultural roots.