Description
The Original
c. 1864 by Robin Rivers is an original piece of mixed media collage on wood from the Recognitions series. I created this piece using my own handmade papers, archival elements and drawing as well as antique found photography. 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 c. 1864 by Robin Rivers
Through the Recognitions series, I am not identifying the women or inventing their stories, but giving those lost to time ground to stand on again. I chose vellum as the primary substrate to allow her to never quite resolve into certainty, to continue to exist without explanation.
The naming convention deliberately refuses to name these women. Their anonymity is not a failure of information. It is the point. These are not portraits in the traditional sense. They are encounters with the self.
In c. 1864, I reconstructed the portrait of a young woman from the middle of the 19th century found again 170 years later in a bin in Vancouver, Canada.
Sources
- Found tintype photography. Second hand shop. Vancouver, Canada. estimated production date 1860-1870
- Handmade papers and drawings, Robin Rivers
- Labyrinth copies – artist renderings
- 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.
