I work across photography, collage, and text to recover the lives of women the historical record left out, overlooked, or misremembered. My process treats this recovery not as reconstruction but as an act of retrieval, giving form to women whose stories survive only in fragments, margins, and silences.
That attention takes different shapes depending on what an inquiry calls for. Sometimes it begins in archives — with found photographs and historical materials I source and research directly, documenting provenance and cultural context before anything enters my work. Sometimes it begins closer in with my own camera, capturing images. I work with these fragments of writing, art, and photography to consider how the power structures in play at different points in the past impacted how women have been portrayed in literature and visual mediums throughout history.
My re-contextualizing of the iconography in medieval stained glass windows through the Retrieval series demonstrates this process. It began with photographing ancient Medieval sites in France and folds in folklore, archives, and storytelling into mixed media collage to draw out more complex and powerful renditions of the feminine past.
While my work often centers Medieval stories, it also finds its roots in the early Victorian era and the interwar period of the 20th century - eras when my Polish and French ancestors were forced from their homeland as a result of displacement. The women carried the immense burden of family and community, but lived anonymous lives. I honour the language, culture, and faith they preserved through my work.
The result is work that sits deliberately between evidence and imagination, making room for intimacy and longing in the gaps that scholarship alone cannot fill. I am interested in what it means to move through time and come, without a complete story, to another person in a future moment; in re-contextuaizing stories of women through examining the gaps that war, marginalization, and systemic erasure create; and in the strange truth that mis-remembering can sometimes bring us closer to the heart of a thing than a singular story, artwork, or photo ever could.
Learn more about my process: How I source and care for historical materials → Sources
My parents always joked that doing the whole alliteration thing by naming me Robin Rivers meant I'd have to do something artistic. They were right.
I've always been drawn to what exists at the edges of understanding—the forgotten places where the old ones still speak if you know how to listen. There's something compelling about the spaces where official history ends and deeper truths begin. These become my starting points.
That journey began with The Sibylline Chronicles and my novel, Woman On The Wall—works that emerged from mystical encounters I was only beginning to understand.
In late 2024, my father was diagnosed with stage 4 liver and kidney failure. In the last few months together, I couldn't write any more. Writing had always come from a place in me that required a sort of excavation and I had no capacity for it in the midst of that loss. I had found collage through a life-changing residency in France and discovered that my 20-year-long photography practice matched perfectly with it. The making became a path through the sadness. It felt holy and purposeful.
So, at age 53, I pivoted.
Born in the mist of Niagara Falls, NY, I grew up in Colorado at the base of the Rocky Mountains. After I fell in love with Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets From The Portuguese, my Grade 10 English teacher suggested I take up writing as a career.
So I did.
I ran copy from the newsroom of my hometown daily newspaper to paste-up on the swing shift to put myself through university. Since then, I’ve written for daily newspapers, magazines, and online publications across North America.
I cut my teeth as a storyteller on the front lines of newspapers across North America. In 1996, I became the youngest recipient of the National (US) Mental Health Association Media Award for a series in which I spent six months detailing the lives of three people with schizophrenia after the state of Illinois shut down its facilities. That series also earned The Golden Bell Award for Feature Writing (Illinois) as well as a top prize for feature writing with the Illinois Associated Press Association. In the years after, I earned numerous Associated Press and Society of Professional Journalists awards for news writing in the United States.
Journalism was one hard-core training ground, but it ultimately did not suit my sensibilities. An ill-advised stint covering crime for a newspaper in the Pacific Northwest prompted my departure. I left journalism to become a different kind of storyteller.
After agreeing to marry a Canadian guy on our second date, I immigrated to Canada.
We built our life in a tiny house on Vancouver Island. There, where rain falls an average of three hundred days a year, I found myself a young mother in an isolated town. I longed for ways to create a magical life for my kids, find my voice, and build community.
That first winter, in the midst of me suffering a rather serious bout of depression, my husband bought me my first professional-grade camera.
"Go find the beauty in the gray," he told me.
I spent the next years with that camera around my neck. My daughters and I explored the woods and marshes. There, I found my voice through visual storytelling and writing. I connected to it through myths and folk tales, and built my first business.
I served as the publisher for Our Big Earth Media Co., creating content and nature experiences for families on Vancouver Island in beautiful British Columbia. We also hosted the annual 30-Day Local Food Challenge. Through that, I worked with farmers, food producers, and ranchers across the Comox Valley to tell their stories.
In 2012, I sold the business in search of adventure. Our wee family drove across Canada and spent a year in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I documented the journey in a photo essay entitled From The Passenger Side. That year in Halifax transformed the way I told stories. It also sparked another phase of my life.
After returning to B.C. and settling in Vancouver, I became a weekly guest on Roundhouse Radio. That incredible community talk radio project has now ended. There, of course, I talked about storytelling.
Seeing a gap in the local offerings, I established Quill Academy of Creative Writing. Teaching was a natural fit. Since then, my team has worked with hundreds of students to help them discover their writing voice and support their skill development. I learn as much from them as hopefully they do from me. I now teach more than 20 classes every week and love every minute of it.
Today, I work across photography, archives, and text to create mixed media collage that recovers the lives of women the historical record left out, overlooked or mis-remembered. My work has been exhibited across North America and internationally and I've been featured in publications including Photo Trouvée Magazine. You can find my work at Montreal's L'Original Gallery.
I live and work 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. My husband, daughters, and sphynx cat Hypatia tolerate me most of the time.
READ MY BOOKRobin's work is hard to resist. She blends historical facts, mysticism, feminine force, and engaging characters to invoke stories that thrill and entertain the reader from start to finish.
