The Morrigan by Robin Rivers

Description

The Original

The Morrigan 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 NASA and 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 The Morrigan 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 The Morrigan, I wanted to reconstruct a medieval cathedral rose window replacing the traditional patriarchal iconography with the powerful goddess of fate from the Celtic tradition. I chose the middle figure, which I shot in 2019 at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, as the focus point. Horse saffrons from medieval Scotland and Poland encircle the Morrigan, punctuated by the lunar cycle. Layered in between are decaying winter leaves and the magical mondara flower. In the next layer you’ll find hazy pastoral scenes of spring and the mare that I shot with homemade filters and an overlay of stag skulls and horns from 19th century Scotland. Finally, the brick which encases the window comes from photos I took of cathedral walls in Paris.

Sources

Original photography from Robin Rivers shot in October 2019 in Paris; December 2024 near Orquevaux, France; and March 2026 in Puyvert, France.
The Met Open Archives: Shaffron (Horse’s Head Defense); Dutch, 1620. (public domain) Link to image.
The Met Open Archives: Shaffron (Horse’s Head Defense). Belonging to an Armor for Field and Tournament Made for Duke Nikolaus “The Black” Radziwill (1515–1565). (public domain) Link to Image.
The Met Open Archives: Stag Trophy Head, Killed by Ned Ross; Horatio Ross; British, born Scotland ca. 1858. (public domain) Link to image.
Lunar Cycles. Eight images from NASA Image and Video Library (Public Domain) Link to Images.
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.