She Builds Things That Last

There is a version of this story where Erin Meriweather is a victim. She will not be telling that version today. She is sitting across from me in her Southern California loft, hands wrapped around a coffee mug, and she looks — there is no other word for it — unbothered. Beautiful in the way that women who have survived something tend to be beautiful. Like the surface has been burned away and what's left is just the structure.

The studio is full of steel. Tall, headless figures crowd the space, arms unfinished, torsos catching the morning light. Each one is the same subject, rendered differently. Each one is of ERIS, the Greek goddess of strife, discord, and chaos.

"People hear that and they say, oh — chaos. Destruction." She sets down her mug. "They always stop there. They never finish the myth."

Meriweather learned to weld from her father, a man she describes with plainspoken tenderness as "usually on a bender, but genuinely thrilled to teach me something." In the garage, smelling of beer and sawdust, he passed her the torch. She never put it down.

She works in Corten steel. The industrial kind, the metal that rusts deliberately, that changes color over years, that gets more beautiful as it weathers. She sources precut sheets and shapes them herself with a plasma cutter. Alone. Her ex-husband, she mentions once and does not elaborate on, was not interested in helping.

"My hands bled sometimes in the early days," she says, and looks at them briefly, almost fondly. "I didn't mind."

There is an eleven-year-old girl somewhere in this story — Joy, Erin's daughter, who by all accounts has her mother's eyes, stubbornness, and complete refusal to be rattled. There is also a golden retriever named Pepper, who is currently asleep on a drop cloth in the corner of the studio and who has opinions about lunchtime.

And there is, apparently, a new chapter. Erin doesn't offer details and I don't push. She says only that she has recently been reminded what it feels like when someone is genuinely good. "Jaime," she says, and smiles in a way that closes the subject.

I ask her what she wants people to understand about the work. She is quiet for a moment, looking at the nearest figure. Headless, armless, incomplete but standing.

"I built her to let time change her," she says finally. "That's the whole point. She's not finished. She was never supposed to be finished."