How I Made This: Erin M. Riley’s Painterly Tapestries

Though she works with yarn, figurative artist Erin M. Riley tends to use the word painterly to describe her work. Turning to tapestry wasn’t a conceptual decision for her, but one made because she liked how she could use yarn to bring color into her art. Over Zoom from her Brooklyn studio, she says, “It’s like my paint; it’s how I learned to develop my images.”
Of course, a tapestry’s qualities are different from those of a painting. Wool doesn’t reflect