Łono (The Womb) - Mixed Media Photography on Wood

Description

The Original

Łono (The Womb) 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 and The Cleveland Museum of Art. 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 Łono (The Womb) 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 Łono, I reimagined the Arthurian myth of Igraine as a window into her true power. She is the womb, the mother, but not just of Arthur — of the land. She cannot be denied her dominion. She is the dominion. I used two public domain archival pieces including a Byzantine halo from The Metropolitan Museum and a reliquary from The Cleveland Museum of Art alongside my own photography to retrieve her. She carries a Polish name to honour Teutonic legends and my roots.

Sources

Original photography from Robin Rivers shot in December 2024 near Orquevaux, France.
The Met Open Archives: Halo from an Icon Cover; 10th–early 11th century; Byzantine; Link to image
The Cleveland Museum of Art: Reliquary Statuette of the Virgin and Child; c. 1330 Austria, Salzburg; 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.