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Igła (The Needle) – Mixed Media Photography On Wood

Status: Available for purchase. 

  • Dimensions: 23″x 36″x2″
  • Frame: Cradled wood panel
  • Rarity: Handmade original, all source material documented. 
  • Medium: Mixed-media photography
  • Signature: Hand-signed by artist
  • Price: $1500US
  • Certificate of authenticity: included from artist.
  • Ships from Vancouver, Canada
  • Pickup available
  • Taxes and customs duties applied in the final invoice.
I believe that every piece of art and its collector should find each other through a personal conversation.  Whether that means visiting the studio in person, taking a virtual studio tour, or arranging your shipping, customs, and payment in a way that feels right for you, I’m looking forward to connecting, sharing the story of this piece as well as taking care of every detail.

Inquire about this piece HERE.

Exhibition and Publication history:
  • Forms and Figures Exhibition juried by Exhibizone | Fall 2026
  • Artist Directory Feature: Kolaj Magazine Newsletter | Sept. 16, 2026
Looking for works on paper? Explore Archival Photography Collage, a beautiful, affordable way to start collecting my work.

 

Description

The Original

Igła (The Needle) by Robin Rivers is an original piece of mixed media photography on wood from the Retrieval series. I created this piece using my own photography shot in Northeastern France and creative commons zero archival images from The Met Open Archives. Each element is hand cut and laid using analog collage techniques. Other elements include acrylic paint and medium. 

The piece measures 23×36″ (w/h) and is mounted on wood. Shipping will be calculated based on location.  Please note that colours and contrast vary between different monitors.  The colours may not match your monitor’s display exactly. Additionally, copyright of my artwork does not transfer with purchase.

The Inspiration for Igła (The Needle) by Robin Rivers

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 Igła, I reconstructed the Arthurian myth of Elaine of Astolat — more widely known as The Lady of Shalott — reimagined as a window into her true power. In the most familiar version, Elaine dies of heartbreak when Lancelot fails to return her love. Her body is set adrift down the river toward Camelot. Yet, she is also cast as an accomplished weaver, seamstress, and keeper of Lancelot’s shield. This piece lives in that tension between passive victim and sovereign force.
 
Here, she is the needle: the instrument through which fate is threaded. She is the unseen commander in the lives of men. I titled the work Igła — the Polish word for needle — as a nod to the Teutonic legends of Poland and my own cultural roots. The ornate battle shield, with its figure suspended as if floating, serves as an homage to the legend’s original imagery and a deliberate subversion of it. I chose the background photography, taken at a lake near Orquevaux, France, for its fae-like quality that captures the liminal space where myth and reality blur. 
 

Sources

  • Original photography from Robin Rivers shot in December 2024 near Orquevaux, France.
  • The Met Open Archives: Burgonet (Front View); Armorer Filippo Negroli; Italian; dated 1543; Link to image
  • The Met Open Archives: Reliquary Bust of Saint Balbina (back view); South Netherlandish; ca. 1520–30; Link to image
  • The Met Open Archives: Three Ceremonial Arrowheads; Bohemian, probably Prague; ca. 1437–39; Link to image
  • The Met Open Archives: Reliquary Bust of a Female Saint (Back View); South Netherlandish; early 16th century; Link to image
  • Artist materials:
    • Acrylic paint,  acrylic matte medium, fine line pen

How I source and care for historical materials → Sources

The Artist

Robin Rivers works across photography, collage, and text to recover the lives of women the historical record left out, overlooked, or misremembered—not as reconstruction, but as retrieval.

That work takes shape in the material each inquiry calls for: specific landscapes she photographs again and again, found photographs, writing, and archival fragments. The result sits deliberately between evidence and imagination: precise about sources while making room for intimacy, longing, and the gaps scholarship alone cannot fill.

Robin creates at Studio Albertine in Vancouver, Canada—on the unceded territory of the Coast Salish Peoples. This includes the territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

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