Artspace

jaatłoh4Ye’iitsoh [_] [im missing 1], 2024
woven fibres
Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain with generous support from Terra Foundation for American Art.
Courtesy the artist and Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis and STARS Gallery, Los Angeles

yoo’ [unstrung], 2023–24
mixed-media installation
Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain with generous support from Terra Foundation for American Art
Courtesy the artist and Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis and STARS Gallery, Los Angeles

One of Diné artist Eric Paul Riege’s grandmothers advised him, as an Indigenous man, to wear jewellery not only so that the Holy People would recognise him but because jewellery would listen when his ears would not.

Riege creates, for the gods, large-scale textile earrings that dangle like overripe fruit. Referencing the enormous Ye’iitsoh deity of Diné myth, Riege’s soft architecture encourages audiences to move between the pieces as if part of a shared choreography, or yarn through a loom. Simultaneously immense and intimate, the earrings encircle a replica of the intestine of the Navajo- Churro sheep, which fed, clothed and supported the Diné people for centuries. Spiralling and monolithic, it too seems jewel-like, a monument to the traditions and crafts that listen closely enough to hear what colonialism has tried to ignore.

For Riege, coming from a line of weavers, this work is both instinct and inheritance, a dance across culture and histories intertwined like warp and weft.

Tender kagi horsehair skin 2, 2023–24
video, 3 mins looped
Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain with generous support from Terra Foundation for American Art
Courtesy the artist and Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis and STARS Gallery, Los Angeles

A visual collage of Eric Paul-Riege’s durational ‘weaving dances’ Tender kagi horsehair skin 2 sees the artist, adorned in Navajo regalia, move between and around his fibre sculptures.

Sinuous movements recall the delicate appearance of Navajo horsehair pots which incorporate hairs from horses’ tails and manes, giving each fired piece a unique, marbled appearance. Used for hundreds of years the pots often retain a gem-like quality similar to that of the Navajo Turquoise stone worn by Riege and other Navajo people to recognise one another and be recognised in return.

Described by Riege as a visual score Tender kagi horsehair skin 2 collages ideas around adornment, performance and identity. In much the same way video-game players costume or “skin” their avatars Riege dons layers of self, first his own ‘tender skin’ and then that of a horse through his Navajo regalia.

Each motion Riege makes, spliced together from across a plethora of individual performances, is interconnected with next. Like the coils of clay which make a pot, or threads which create a cloth Tender kagi horsehair skin 2 renders animate the inextricable fabric of history, identity and performance.

White Bay Power Station

…oo-O-oo-O-oo-O-oo-O-oo-O-oo-O-oo-O-oo-O-oo-O-oo-O-oo…, 2023
muslin, sherpa, faux fur, plastic and glass beads, synthetic and polyester yarn, pleather, foam, polyester fibrefill
Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain with generous support from Terra Foundation for American Art
Courtesy the artist and Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis and STARS Gallery, Los Angeles

From the end of the fifteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, swathes of North America were occupied as Spanish territories, the colonisers bringing with them foreign livestock such as the Spanish Churra sheep. Through both trade and the occasional raid, many Diné/Navajo people, the First Nations who were living on the edges of Spanish occupations, acquired these sheep. Gradually expanding their flocks, the newly minted Navajo–Churro sheep became part of the fabric of Diné spirituality. The sheep’s milk and meat kept the Diné people fed, while its wool was used in creating the now iconic textiles traded with other Indigenous nations, as well as Spanish, US, and Mexican merchants.

For Eric-Paul Riege, who describes everything he does as ‘weaving’, Navajo–Churro sheep are integral to his identity and creative practice. Every part of the animal plays a crucial role within his community. In this work, an oversized sheep intestine spans three floors, as if it were the innards of a god. Spiraling both upwards and downwards with the weave and weft of the cloth, the piece recalls how cultural knowledge passes between generations and across the vast plains and histories of the Diné people.

For Australian audiences, sheep are closely tied to settler history. However, in the hands of Riege and the people of Navajo, they are transformed into keepers of Indigenous narratives, cosmologies and innovations.

Eric–Paul Riege is a Diné weaver and fibre artist working in collage, durational performance, installation, woven sculpture, and wearable art. Using weaving as both means and metaphor to tell hybrid tales that interlace stories from Diné spirituality with his own interpretations and cosmology, Riege understands his artworks as animate and mobile. His practice pays homage and links him to generations of weavers in his family that aids him in generating spaces of sanctuary. 

Read more about the 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, by purchasing the catalogue here.