Birthdays can be polarizing occasions: celebratory, on the one hand, and provoking oft-unwanted self-reflection, on the other. As she approached her fortieth year, fiber artist Erin M. Riley found herself ruminating on memories of childhood and the meaning of home. These reflections were fodder for the large-scale, hand-woven tapestries on view at P·P·O·W in ‘Life Looks Like a House For a Few Hours.' Working with wool and cotton, Riley expertly transformed imagery sourced from her personal life, the internet and newspapers into textiles that are palpably tense and emotionally charged.
A number of these compositions portray Riley clad in lingerie, revealing tattoos across her body. Her depictions of selfies and risqué laptop photos focus on specific parts – hands, buttocks, torso. At the same time, she often renders a less mediated version of her body standing or reclining nearby. These scenes are overlaid with other imagery drawn from her life: the house she grew up in, notes from her mother. Through allusions to trauma and social media, these works evoke the mundane violence, rote passivity, and visual and emotional confusion that characterize our interactions with images – and with one another – online.
Consider You Broke (2024), which depicts a car crash above a paused video scrubber and a closed-caption text reading ‘You broke my heart!’ (a scene from Sex and the City, according to the press release). The mangled vehicle is overlaid with several images, including a webcam shot of a woman in underwear accompanied by a notification that reads ‘Pullup for precise seeking.' The tool to find a specific moment in the video appears as a pop-up along the scrubber bar, suggesting the partly nude woman’s body is the ‘most replayed’ clip. This bleak inclusion speaks to expectations of instant gratification in the digital realm, and the human urge to consume what appears to be a salacious part of the video, repeatedly. Only the woman’s torso is visible in the still, reducing her to an anonymous body. There’s a tinge of irony in calling the search tool ‘precise seeking,' as if the woman is an object to be found.
Riley conveys raw emotions with fragmented context, allowing viewers to insert their own experiences into the gaps; it is this that makes her work so relatable. This strategy comes to a head in the tapestry Road Reverberations (2025), which depicts a date-stamped photo of a rural street turning into a dead end. Strewn across the grey road are sewn phrases revealing a strained – indeed, toxic – relationship. In a contradictory outpouring, the words convey regret and guilt, shift blame, belittle the reader and praise the reader. Some phrases are faded, perhaps from overuse, or because they were intentionally erased or retracted. The words feel empty, as if said out of appeasement rather than conveying any real meaning – a manipulation tactic commonly employed by abusers. The speaker’s identity is left open-ended; this could be any troubled relationship, even with oneself.
Riley’s tapestries allude to specific traumatic experiences as well as the more collective unease of navigating a digital sea of fleeting, yet eternal, images. The contrast between the images and the media by which they are conveyed – throwaway fragments recreated on an epic and meticulous scale – makes it hard not to wonder if the artist’s hand-weaving technique offers a sense of relief or catharsis. Working on large looms, Riley adeptly controls the physical process, repeating motions and slowly watching as the image builds. There’s an element of triumph in Riley’s work: even if her images reveal moments when she had no control over her life, she has persevered and regained agency through every stitch.
Erin M. Riley’s ‘Life Looks Like a House For a Few Hours’ is on view at P·P·O·W, New York until 18 October.