Welcome back to ARTMATTERS: The Podcast for Artists
Erin M. Riley is a Brooklyn-based artist whose large-scale woven tapestries explore intimacy, memory, trauma, and identity through meticulously constructed images assembled from personal photographs, found imagery, and internet culture.
She received her BFA from MassArt and her MFA from Tyler School of Art, is represented by P·P·O·W in New York, and has exhibited at institutions including the Brooklyn Museum, Museion in Italy, and the 16th Lyon Biennale. Her work is held in numerous public collections, and she is the recipient of both a United States Artists Fellowship and an American Academy of Arts & Letters Art Purchase Prize.
I sat down with Erin M. Riley in her Brooklyn live-work studio to talk about why she intentionally lives where she works and how weaving dictates every aspect of her daily life, physical health, exercise, fasting, posture, breathing, and endurance. We explore the importance of slowness, what it feels like to spend four months making a work you can't truly see until the very end, and the dramatic reveal after removing a finished tapestry from the loom.
We talk about designing and improving weaving tools, the importance of keeping a personal archive, her fascinating system of hand-dyeing, mixing, and preparing yarn before she weaves a single stitch, and the changing place of textiles in contemporary art, and whether the old art-versus-craft debate is finally vanishing.
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host: Isaac Mann
www.isaacmann.com
insta: @isaac.mann
guest: Erin M. Riley
www.erinmriley.com
insta: @erinmriley
Thank you as always to ARRN, the Detroit-based artist and instrumentalist, for the music.