Weaving Dis-Comforters

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 PPOW 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.