Whenever I think about a loom, it brings to mind Penelope, publicly weaving all day to privately unravel at night. It's a cycle of creation and erasure by which she both remembers and waits for her far-wandered warrior husband while deferring the attentions of her avaricious suitors. Erin M. Riley, whose weavings similarly mark a persistence of memory and an act of resistance, is far too prolific in her practice for anyone to imagine she could ever indulge in Penelope's procrastinations. It's somewhat astounding to think that this year she's had one person shows in Budapest and London while preparing for her third solo exhibition, Life Looks Like a House For a Few Hours, with her New York gallery P·P·O·W in Fall 2025. That’s the kind of output you’d expect from a painter with a studio full of assistants, not a textile artist who works alone producing excruciatingly laborious and detailed tapestries. So dedicated to her craft that we might question if she has time for much of life. Except of course that the personally charged narratives of her art offer ample evidence of a full biography, rife with messy misadventures and conjoined to an inner life of such dynamic complexity, that her stories leap at the truth as if honesty were a verb.
lntimate and revelatory, Riley's narrative textiles present her parables of self within densely layered social contexts and family histories as a disquieting investigation of identity and habit. Exquisite and lushly evocative in their materiality, her woven pictures are themselves both a stitching together and unraveling of self and psyche, searing autofictions cluttered with minutia, scattered like scars that shimmer with talismanic meanings. Compelling, confrontational and confessional, Riley is unrelenting in her honesty, taking inventory of her relationships, accounting for the gravitational pull of trauma and mapping the patterns that bind us to pain and pleasure like a cartography of suffering. She holds these things dear, trying not to leave any details out, spun in her hands, taken from the heart, and laid bare for contemplation in a deeply considered act of letting go.
Riley's latest work arrives at a critical point for the artist, nearing the milestone of forty years old, ending a long situationship and shedding all the toxic associations with her biological family. An extrication and perhaps even a rebirth, even as a clean break, is inherently messy and protracted, part of a process that involves both therapy and that other more public form of actualization; artmaking. If itis ultimately a project of making herself whole, it is one that exists in fissures and fragments, what she has come to portray as a "splintered self," embedded and layered in secrets that are often as much individual as they are cultural. To air her confidences so unreservedly, Riley relies on the evidence of life's ephemera-old photographs from a past she cannot always fully conjure, quotidian aspects of daily life that might act as visual triggers, the look of abusive relationships that still carry the memory of fear. If her art is strikingly of the moment and deftly vested in popular culture, it's because her experiences are recognizable and relatable for most of us.
The appeal of Riley's pictures, a bit transgressive and perhaps even transcendent, is in the artist's deft comingling of traditional forms and methodologies with vernacular, lowbrow contemporaneity. While much of the content of her work reflects feminist perspectives and deals with what might be considered women's issues, she is clear that her weaving is in no way a gendered medium. For Riley, the tapestry's appeal is one of process and longevity. Today tapestries that are centuries old continue to fascinate us–the Bayeux Tapestry, which depicts the Norman Conquests of 1066, making the news for being lent by the French so that it can return to England for the first time in over 900 years. And there's the Unicorn Tapestries at the Cloisters inspiring the popular horror movie Death of a Unicorn. But as so little is actually known about these cultural relics, the weavers themselves remain invisible. "I like that idea of hiding away," Riley explains, “how they have been lost and recovered, so durable, but somehow the underdog and underappreciated.”
Riley does not reinvent the tapestry, but she brings it back with a vibrancy and resonance spot on to these times. The great tapestries of the world, like the Apocalypse Tapestry based on the Book of Revelation or the aforementioned Bayeux and Unicorn Tapestries, are epics of historic, mythic, and visionary nature, and what we could say by medieval terms are an early form of media. Riley may tap into their more visceral aspects of fantasy, violence, and memory, but so too do her weavings reflect their mode of narrative in how their stories unfold like film or comic strips. In this way, she instills visual markers throughout her textile tales, cues, like easter eggs, that help tell the story. “I try to leave it to the viewers to piece it together,” she tells us, “In a family fight no one has the same experience. Truth is what you make of it, how you live with it.”