Erin M. Riley

Using traditional tapestry techniques, I weave images of young women in states of undress or exposure, personal objects and landscapes relating to destruction and death. My work is the culmination of research into addiction, sexual experimentation, popular internet culture, the effects of single parent households, socio-economic status’ etc.

I am drawn to the images taken for private exchanges that become littered on the internet. I am using my own images that I have sent to lovers as well as the objects that I have formed psychological attachments to, objects that have had impacts in other people’s lives, displays of arrests, deaths, addictions.

I am interested in the honesty of sexuality, but also how courtships, pornography and sex is changing as a result of the mass depiction of these intimate moments online. I am inspired by the beauty of a woman who takes a self portrait for her own pleasure and the pleasure of the ones she cares about, and all the people who get to glimpse into that moment and what is done with the power of that intimacy.