The bond between art and sport feels natural to Rives, as he believes that art and rugby can be interconnected, and emotions are found in both. "In sports you make movement and you are maybe sculpting or painting in the space with your body," he told Clara Iaccarino of the "Sydney Morning Herald". "In art you use instruments. Art is just energy, you have to do it; it has to come out." He works in a disused railway shed in the north of Paris, where he forms and twists his found steel, manipulating the shapes created by the resulting positive and negative spaces. He cuts the beams strategically to form complex compositions in which the hardness of the steel forms a powerful juxtaposition to the soft curves. Rives' sculptures were called by the French "La Dépêche du Midi" "a marvelous mixture of suffering, grace and beauty".