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Kraina (The Realm) – 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.

Looking for works on paper? Explore Archival Photography Collage, a beautiful, affordable way to start collecting my work.

 

Description

The Original

Kraina (The Realm) 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 Western Canada and creative commons zero archival images from Biblioteka Narodowa and 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 Kraina (The Realm) 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 Kraina, I reconstructed the iconic Arthurian myth of Morgana (Morgan le Fay) reimagined as a window into her embodiment of the land, its divine caretaker. In most versions,  Morgana is presented as the dark sorceress who uses her cunning magic to seduce Arthur and lure other knights of the Round Table to take Camelot down.  But, she did not come to the legends as a villain. Indeed, she entered the storyline as one of the original guardians of Avalon; a divine figure demoted to control the perception of her agency and power.

Here, she is the realm, the powerful guardian of the mythical realm. Her agency and survival through hundreds of generations serves as a meassage that older, stranger forces exist beyond the constructs of king and country. She is not wife, victim or prize, but the sovereign. I titled the work Kraina — the Polish word for the mythical realm— as a nod to the Teutonic legends of Poland and my own cultural roots. The imagery begins with  wycinanka – intricate cutouts from my Polish tradition. The cape is a pair of photos I shot of a massive forest cedar struck by lightening. The feathers around it come from a French feather headdress, a nod to Malory’s Le Mort d’Atrthur. The ox head sketches from the 16th century draw in the Hussar warrior tradition of Poland.  The ancient forest behind sets the tone.

 

Sources

  • Original photography from Robin Rivers shot in 2026 in Canada.
  • The Met Open Archives; Three Ox Skulls, Salvator Rosa; Link to image
  • Polona.pl: Opoczno Cutout; Link to image
  • The Met Open Archives: Feather Headdress; Link to Image
  • The Met Open Archives: Crowned Head of Woman  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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