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Mogiła (The Grave) – 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

Mogiła (The Grave)  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 Statens Historiska Museer. 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 Mogiła (The Grave) 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 Mogiła, I reimagined the Arthurian myth of Hellawes as a window into her true power. In Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, she serves as a powerful sorceress and Lady of Castle Nygurmous, obsessed with Lancelot to the point of trapping and testing him. She is the warning, dead by heartbreak when Lancelot outsmarts her. Yet, hundreds of years earlier she began as the ancient Norse goddess Hel, the great psychopomp and keeper of the passage between the living and the dead, only demonized by men who could not control her.
 
So, here, she is the grave: not a woman undone by love, but the power inside every ending that cannot be bargained with, outlasted, or refused.  I titled the work Mogiła — the Polish word for a burial mound — as a nod to the Teutonic legends of Poland and my own cultural roots. It carries more weight than the word “grave.” It is the dead made visible in the landscape, reshaping the terrain around it – a sort of womb. Life begins with the womb and ends with the grave, revealing the singularly feminine act of transforming one form of life into another.  No story constructed will ever change that.
 
The black figure is that of an ancient holy woman, and the inclusion of a Viking spearhead pays homage to the goddess Hel. Although it is covered over in the piece, the paths in the photos connect to form the rune Gebo – the gift. In the ancient world, every exchange created a sacred knot between giver and receiver. It remains intact beneath the dark figure to signify the crossing from life to death. No one leaves unchanged. I chose the background photography, taken at a forest 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: Virgin or Holy Woman (Back view); French, 14th century Link to image
  • The Met Open Archives: Open-Ring Brooch; Pictish or Irish, early 800s; Link to image
  • The Met Open Archives: Grave Monument Byzantine, 9th century; Link to image
  • Statens Historiska Museer: Spearhead Petersen I; Viking, 800-1100s; 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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