Erin M. Riley’s work challenges her psychologically as she plumbs directly from her own past. But her work is also challenging physically. She dyes most of her yarn (sourced from shuttered textile mills), and her long process includes sketching to scale—in tapestry, the drawing is referred to as a cartoon—before placing the sketch beneath the floor loom. Hand-weaving the image to completion takes about a month. Using traditional techniques, Riley works within a methodology practiced for thousands of years. Yet her large-scale tapestries do not resemble anything traditional; she unflinchingly takes on intimate contemporary subject matter. In the past, she has focused on digital culture (website tabs and JPEGs) and her own tattooed body. Lately, her work has reckoned with her childhood and the scribbles and totems she can (or can’t) remember.
For her new show at PPOW gallery in New York, “Life Looks Like a House For a Few Hours,” on view through October 18, she created twelve works, two of which are shaped pieces. Littered with Polaroids, balloons, YouTube screens, faceless silhouettes, party streamers, clippings of ads for SAABs and Hondas, a Cabbage Patch doll, trees, and a mailbox, the weaver/artist deploys visuals the way authors deploy autofiction. She is unafraid to explore discomfort—and in fact welcomes candor about family trauma, sexual violence, self-harm and other things that tug at one’s heart and mind.
Observer spoke with Riley about her changing attitude towards birthdays, deciphering her own coded writings, being mesmerized by other people’s diaries and a pivotal moment from Sex and the City she inserted into her work.
Tell me about your day-to-day.
I’ve had a live/work studio in Brooklyn for the past 12 years. I wake up every day, and I weave until I’m exhausted, then I do it again the next day. I made a really big piece three years ago, and I realized I needed to think about my practice as this sort of athletic thing because weaving is such a physical activity.
Do you always work toward a show?
Not necessarily. I’m always making work, especially if I’m excited or curious about something. But shows give me this opportunity to make bodies of work rather than just pieces, and create this story. They provide an opportunity to make a piece I’ve been waiting to make, but that didn’t really make sense on its own.
Does what you’re showing in New York overlap with what you showed in London earlier this year at Mother’s Tankstation?
In some ways, there’s overlap; it’s always about my life. But in London, the show was sort of tongue-in-cheek, whereas this show is a little bit more serious. There’s a lot of black—it’s just visually dark, and it’s a lot about childhood and landscape. It’s moving away from this selfie sexy space, trying to unravel who I am and what life is.
Was there an inflection point that made you want to express yourself differently relative to the selfie, sexy space?
I have been almost regressing in my late 30s. I’ve been waiting to be a kid my whole life… to, like, be a brat, be irresponsible. I thought that one day my family would be normal and not have any problems, and I could have problems, and I could stop being the one who took on all the burden. But that didn’t happen. I realized that I had to stop waiting. I’m turning 40 this year, in December. I thought, what am I going into my 40th year with? What am I carrying? I did a lot of cutting, like, okay, I have to stop repeating cycles.
Is this the aesthetic manifestation of that change?
Yeah. The show has multiple references to birthdays, and I really hate my birthday. Not aging—I don’t mind aging—but I think there’s this attention thing that was really uncomfortable in my family, because it really felt fake. On my birthday, everyone was kind of cosplaying that they cared. And I knew that the minute it was over, it was over. I don’t like pomp and circumstance, and I don’t like fakeness. In adulthood, I stopped doing birthdays, but this year, I’m like the show is about a birthday. It’s about existing. It’s a lot of me as a kid and the spaces where I grew up. There’s a lot of mysterious stuff, too. There’s a lot of family lore, but I don’t actually have the story. I don’t have pictures of my childhood home, but I have pictures of this random house, and I wove that. There are these weird sorts of avatars of place.
Tell me about the work that gives the show its name. What does it epitomize?
That piece is my sketchbook, a time card and a photo of me at—I think—my fifth birthday. My time card… I have a lot of records, these sorts of ledgers of time. I grew up on the Cape, and every summer I worked 70 or 80 hours a week because I needed money and I needed to escape. I think the time card is very much one of those things where it’s my accomplishment, my persistence and labor. So much of weaving is labor. And there’s this amazing photo of ballerinas that I had in my childhood bedroom, but one of the ballerinas has combat boots on, which is such a punk dream—not having to go to ballet class. Then there’s this line: “life looks like a house for a few hours.” I don’t know where it came from, or if I just wrote it.
Would you say that you’re an archivist of your own life, saving things that you then create as artworks? Do you need that source material to actualize your work?
How I start shows or think through things is: I always go through my photo collections, my boxes of pictures. I always go through my hard drives. I always just look back at stuff. My work has a lot of references recreating photographs, like the phone selfie digital culture. There are a lot of references to film images and date stamps. I think there was something so treasurable about photographs in the past—having an object and not being able to zoom and not being able to find other versions of it. As a kid, I instilled animus in objects: I held them, and they were sort of powerful. Photographs are very similar. So there is an archival aspect. I’ve looked a lot at my body, but looking back at where it came from, or where it’s been, is sort of a newer thing, void of sexuality. What are my origins?
Given that your work is infused with so much personal history, does it feel loaded to have a collector buy your work?
I don’t think so; there is that sort of detachment. I’ve always allowed things to leave that aren’t securely attached. I’m sort of fluid in this way. Things have value, but I’m also used to loss. I think there is constant processing and resetting. Life is continually working on things and continually letting go. I don’t think I’m that precious with my stuff. I’m just using my work as a way to work through things.
Text and words are a recurrent touchstone. In one work—Road Reverberations—the ground is covered in sentences. Is text something you add in after you’ve decided on the visual references? Or is that part of the thinking initially?
Road Reverberations is a piece of my childhood: we lived at the bottom of two hills, and we used to draw on them in chalk. I asked people [on Instagram]: What was the line that stuck with you in your last abusive relationship, or with somebody who was really toxic? Those lines are from people sending me what stuck with them. “I wish things turned out differently” or “I didn’t mean that.” Or “I’m sorry you feel that way.” You know, all those sorts of bullshit things that people say when they’re hurting you. Others are sort of gibberish or poetic.
When I was younger, I kept diaries, but my mother read them, so I started creating codes and nicknames, sort of talking around things. I created this way of speaking that nobody could understand. A lot of my sketchbooks and journals through high school have a lot of this language. People used to take my journals during class and sort of free write with them, so I’d have different people’s thoughts, too. Language has been a really powerful tool, although it’s been obscured. It’s been this relief—release—but there isn’t a lot of meaning. I love to read; there’s this going back and forth between reading and writing. I really love reading diaries—as a kid, The Diary of Anne Frank and Zlata’s Diary, all of these war-torn diaries of being a kid living through horrible experiences. That sort of moved over to Live Journal, where everyone was talking to the internet… where you’re talking to something inanimate, and you’re just getting stuff out, there’s no real conception of audience, or no expectation of audience. I’ve always written and kept notes. I’m perpetually writing my own story, allowing it to be sort of validated through my work.
I’ve been listening to audiobooks lately. In college, I lived with somebody who was really obsessed with fonts, and I thought about letters a lot because of him. Weaving words is really hard, but it’s also very fun.
Would you consider your work confrontational, to some degree?
I would say so. I don’t know how not to be confrontational when there are issues. I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing. I really hate avoiding stuff, I really hate denying. In this show, there’s a piece that’s a scene where Carrie from Sex and the City cheats on Aidan, and there’s this moment—this YouTube screenshot—that says: “You broke my heart” over the affair. It’s so blunt, you know?
I can absolutely hear Aidan’s exact intonation of “you BROKE my HEART!”
I think that moment is just so solid, you know? It’s about all of those twisted ethical boundaries that I don’t think a lot of people like to admit to or talk about, because it’s pretty shitty. A lot of the images of me in the show are from a relationship that was perpetually secret.
You’re using age-old techniques, yet your work is so enmeshed in contemporary life. Is there a historical tapestry or art historical reference that has marked you?
Not really. I didn’t really love art history as a kid—I really didn’t relate to kings and castles. But I love weaving. There’s a lot of really beautiful weaving that I really related to viscerally… like Magdalena Abakanowicz is this amazing weaver, who weaved with found materials. Hannah Ryggen is somebody who’s getting her flowers right now. She’s this weaver born in the 1800s and made these incredible tapestries. She dyed all of her yarn; it’s about herself and the world. When I’m in Paris or London, I look at the old tapestries, and they’re amazing. But I was never drawn to that stuff.
Which artists, in any media, influence you?
People who are diaristic, who use their body. Luchita Hurtado is a huge influence on my work. Louise Bourgeois—pivotal. With Louise, her saying this thing happened with my father, it sort of led me down this path. I think that gave me a lot of permission to work with family stuff and dwell on things. Tracey Emin, doing the quilting stuff, textiles with trauma stuff. There are a lot of different people who used their bodies and used sexuality or self-portraiture in ways that I really connect with.
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