Description
The Original
Thornwood by Robin Rivers is an original piece of mixed media photography from the Misrememberings series. I created this piece using my original photography that has not been digitally altered, acrylic medium and gold.
The framed piece measures 25×26.5″. 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 Thornwood by Robin Rivers
Memory and time fragment, reconstructing themselves into spaces that live vividly in our experience, even when they are not a faithful representation of the original. That is the territory the Misrememberings series explores.
Thornwood layers two images I shot in and around Château d’Orquevaux in the Champagne-Ardenne region of France: the château boathouse, and the thorny fields that stretch across the winter landscape beyond the village. One image speaks of stillness and shelter. The other of wildness, of things that snag and hold and do not let go easily. I hand-treated each photograph with acrylic medium and gold before collaging them together — because longing forms in layers.
This is Albertine’s world. Her love cannot enter it. Not because of a locked door or a spoken refusal, but because the landscape itself has closed around her — beautiful and cold and full of things with edges. The boathouse sits at the water’s margin, unreachable in its own quiet way. The thorns grow, season after season, between one person and another. Longing lives in exactly this kind of terrain — not in grand gestures of separation, but in the layers that form early as protection and later become relentless isolation.
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 all pieces at Studio Albertine in Vancouver, Canada—on the unceded territory of the Coast Salish Peoples. This includes the territories of the xÊ·məθkwÉ™yÌ“É™m (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and SÉ™lÌ“ÃlwÉ™taÊ”/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
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