Description
The Original
Fleur by Robin Rivers is an original piece of mixed media collage on paper from the Albertine Series. I created this piece using antique postcards, found photography, my original photography that has not been digitally altered, handmade papers, and acrylic medium.
The piece measures 11×14″ (w/h) unframed. 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 Fleur by Robin Rivers
Paris, the city of light, romance, wonder. At times, it may seem cliché. But, what of its magic? Its way of drawing one in and reconstructing how we perceive the world? Through the Albertine series, I wanted to explore how 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.
Fleur combines found photography of a man along with an antique Parisian postcard from Jardins du château de Versailles alongside my original botanical photography, ephemera, and handmade papers. Each element is carefully chosen and cut to capture a single moment when Henri is sitting in the garden on a foggy December day and is lost in daydreams about the statues and Albertine.
Sources
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- Found post card, Gardens at Versailles, possibly Yvon, (c. 1920-30)
- Orphaned cabinet card of a man, c. 1890-1910, acquired via secondary markets, public domain or presumed public domain based on age and publication status.
- Artist materials
- Handmade papers, vellum, gold acrylic paint, acrylic matte medium; Original botanical photography from Robin Rivers
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
