Brooklyn-based artist Erin M. Riley weaves the female condition into her tapestries, exploring the coexistence of innocence and exploitation.
Riley’s work with textiles began during her freshman year of college at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, when she took her first weaving class. Right away, she discovered an attraction to tapestries.“[Tapestry] combined this idea of painting, drawing, collage,” Riley says. “It allowed me to sort of have a process but also have a narrative and visual language.” While she didn’t relate to the content in most tapestries she was seeing, she was drawn to the process. From there, Riley began to create woven collages of her sisters and herself, calling upon their own personal experiences and trauma.
Riley talks about the “Duality of Perversion,” thrusting the viewer into a stark world propelled by frank depictions of trauma and the female condition, and how the two are inherently intertwined. Informed by her and her family’s relationship with sex, drugs, and partying, her content ungulates between depictions of inescapable loneliness and the deep need for approval. She twists the narrative, demanding respect for giving the world exactly what it wants and hates the most: a hypersexual woman.
“For me, [self-nudes] felt like a natural extension of my sexuality.” She weaves her own nude portraits, usually in the form of selfies, with hand-dyed wool, creating stark depictions of hypersexuality, drug abuse, and the dangers of existing as a woman in the digital age. Used condoms, tampons, and pornographic scenes further that discomfort, unafraid to expose the line of pleasure and pain women must toe every day.
Riley submitted “Training Wheels” for McColl Center’s 2025 Benefit Art Auction. While the tapestry of a small girl on a tricycle seems wholesome at first, a closer examination reveals the darker side of Riley’s childhood. “Training Wheels” explores the darkness of existing as an innocent little girl while experiencing intergenerational sexual abuse, and thus the sexualization of her from the time she was a child. Her work exists as a form of evidence. “You don't have pictures of the horrible things that happened,” she says. “It's like there [are] no marks.”
After graduating with her MFA from Tyler School of Art, she was accepted to her first residency as an artist at McColl Center. “Charlotte’s a whole different place,” Riley says when describing being in the city for the first time. With support from the residency, she finally had the funding and resources to truly support her practice.
“McColl was much more,” Riley says when comparing residency programs. Though her work is deeply personal and typically created in the solitude of her studio, she praises the visibility and public interaction McColl Center provided, and to this day she remains connected with the community she developed there.
