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Ostrzę (The Blade) – 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.

Exhibition and Publication history:
  • Selected: No Name Collective London June 2026 Image of the Month
Looking for works on paper? Explore Archival Photography Collage, a beautiful, affordable way to start collecting my work.

Description

The Original

Ostrzę (The Blade)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. 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 Ostrzę (The Blade) 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 this piece,  I wanted to reconstruct a window based on the Arthurian myth of the Lady In the Lake. In traditional storytelling and iconography, the passive woman provides the sword to the king. Instead, I reworked the imagery so that she is the sword, the power, the force from which only a true leader could draw. I also layered in the triple goddess motif to honour the old one Hekate and my Polish heritage (matryoshka). Finally, I chose stark background photography to create a sense of the old faith and ancient power of women. 
 
 

Sources

  • Original photography from Robin Rivers shot in December 2024 near Orquevaux, France.
  • The Met Open Archives: Cross Hilt Sword; Bladesmith Blade signed by Clemens Horn; German; 1600–1625. Link to image.
  • The Met Open Archives: Marble portrait bust of a woman; Roman;  ca. 193–211 CE. 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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