By Yuanrong Li on April 29, 2023 Image Second Stomach, 2020, by Erika Terwilliger In this interview, Erika Terwilliger shares her empathic and tactile approach to deconstructing and reimagining everyday materials revealing an embodied knowledge through laborious processes. Yuanrong Li: Your practice is centered around the concept of the life cycle of objects and materials. Can you tell us more about the ideas behind your work and your explorations of preservation and decay? Erika Terwilliger: At its most basic, my practice pulls things apart and figures out how to put them back together again. The work is built around maintaining actions that are caring and protective but also allow the object or material to erode and eventually pass out of a life. I like to intervene in the normal path an object or material might take by hanging onto things a bit longer than normal, whether creating a woven record of my compost, reconstructing a worn blue plastic tarp, or picking apart the carpet padding from underneath my bedroom floor. The question of when and how to let something go is integral to the practice. How do you approach the process of unmaking and remaking objects, specifically in your project Tarp? The Tarp project marked the beginning of this kind of work. It began when I found an old blue plastic tarp at my parent’s house, and I decided to unravel it to understand its construction: a simple pattern of plastic threads going over and under, the warp and the weft. This continued until I was left with a pile of blue plastic which I tied end to end to form a single string. I warped an old rug weaving loom with the ball of plastic and began to recreate the same pattern. When finished, the new weaving was a fraction the size of the original as the plastic was fragile and the loom snapped almost a quarter of the threads. What I was left with would never keep out the rain or cover a pile of dirt in the garden. My act of maintenance undermined its original purpose, and I was left with an object even less traditionally functional than the original. I was caring for something that would normally be discarded as useless, but by caring for it I was also eroding it. If I were to repeat the weaving pr