Description
The Original
Reliquaire by Robin Rivers is an original piece of mixed media collage on paper. I created this piece using archival photography, handwritten letters, found photography that has not been digitally altered, handmade papers, and acrylic medium.
The piece measures 6×8″ (w/h) unframed and is mounted on paper. 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 Reliquaire by Robin Rivers
Reliquaire is inspired by women. If you look closely you can find so many layers of women’s lives in this piece. A woman in Warsaw checking a rations list, a dancer in Paris exhausted after a performance. A woman in her own home. All sacred relics.
Sources
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- Archiwów Państwowych (State Archives of Poland)
- Paris Musées Archives
- Found photography (thrifted in Vancouver, Canada)
- Artist materials
- Handmade papers, vellum, gold paint and gilding, photo paper, gel pens, 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.
