The article below contains adult content.The erotic self-shot gets a new spin in Brooklyn-based fiber artist Erin Riley's hand-woven tapestries. “When I start to date somebody and I start to send them images, I’ll weave those images into a tapestry. I want them to have been sent…" Riley tells The Creators Project. "I want them to be part of this real dialogue. We all send naked pictures to each other. This is just a fact of being a person nowadays.”
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Whether or not you engage in the practice, it's hard to deny Riley’s tapestries their place at the forefront of the selfie art movement. Such casually graphic imagery is not typical within textiles, so the medium itself inspires a reaction in viewers. “I was always fascinated with the idea that tapestries are like this elite thing where only like people with castles could have tapestries. Being in punk and DIY culture I was always like ‘well… I can weave whatever I want,’ So it was kind of subverting the craft,” Riley explains.
The 30-year-old Riley has been working as a fiber artist since she first learned to weave in college, and her intricate work can take anywhere between two days and a month depending on the size of the piece. Not all of her works are self-portraits, either; some come from images found on the Internet or sent in from fans, which fall into a separate series titled, Nudes.
The works aim to embrace and celebrate female sexuality, which is slowly growing in mainstream acceptance. Riley cites Miley Cyrus as an inspiration: “There are these real moments that I find that are like selfies. Like where a woman feels the sexiest, and how that exudes onto the image. It’s like a private moment that just happens to be photographed. I feel like nowadays, all our really real private moments are being photographed and documented. And so we have all these foreplay images that used to just be real life.”
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Riley’s next project takes this movement even further. After several years of collecting porn screenshots at the moment of climax, she's been weaving them, overlayed with their timestamps. Below is an exclusive image of one of the screencaps, still on the loom in Riley’s studio:
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