This series, now titled Retrieval, began as The Female Gaze. I first called this work by its original name because that was the legible framework I had for what I unearthed. The deeper I went into the land and the archives, the more I understood the work as something older and more specific than the gaze framework could hold. The work is about retrieval. That's the right word.
It emerged from the experience of walking the land of Southern and Northeastern France and the stories it revealed. I spent my days on foot, listening deeply, photographing places under different conditions, listening to the trees and the water. It took me into liminal spaces where the old ones showed me the power held in the land and the powerful feminine that never disappeared. It withdrew into the land and the old places, waiting for us to listen and give form to what wants to return. These ancient forces led me to specific imagery - water, fire, crossroads, sacred groves - that carries the power of the natural world that they want restored.
Working with archival materials and my own photography — shaped by my French and Polish roots — I work against the inherited iconography, recovering the feminine presence it was built to suppress. These are not reconstructions. They are retrievals: the primordial feminine returned to form, as though cultural memory had never been severed from its origin.
