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Melusine – Mixed Media Photography on Wood

Status: Available for purchase. 

  • Dimensions: 36″x 48″x2″
  • Frame: Cradled wood panel
  • Rarity: Handmade original, all source material documented. 
  • Medium: Mixed-media photography
  • Signature: Hand-signed by artist
  • Price: $2500US
  • 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

Melusine 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 southern and northeastern France. I also used public domain 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 36×48″ (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 Melusine 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 Melusine, I wanted to respond to The Morrigan, which I created a month earlier. While The Morrigan recreated a rose window that called to the primordial feminine, Melusine becomes the portal, open and returning that energy to the world. I drew inspiration from old stories, holy wells,  and ancient ruined castles where I spent much time exploring in France and Scotland. There’s a nod here as well to Polish novelist Andrzej Sapkowski (of Witcher fame) and his incredible worlds that inspire me constantly. 
 

Sources

  • Original photography from Robin Rivers shot in March 2026 in Puyvert, France.
  • The Met Open Archives: Mermaid; Italian, Padua; 16th Century. Link to Image.
  • The Met Open Archives: Stag Trophy Head, Killed by Ned Ross; Horatio Ross British, born Scotland; ca. 1858 Link to Image.
  • Artist materials:
    • Acrylic paint,  acrylic matte medium

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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