Ethiopia
Hello, I'm Selam
Tesfaye
I come from a family of icon painters. I work in the visual language of Ethiopian Orthodox art. Silk carries that light differently than canvas does.
Born in Addis Ababa to a family of icon painters, Selam Tesfaye works at the intersection of Ethiopian Orthodox iconography and abstract expressionism. Her designs carry the visual weight of centuries — the deep golds of church murals, the crimson of ceremonial robes, the geometric precision of the Lalibela cross. She trained under her mother, one of the few women icon painters in Gondar.
My father was a painter of icons. Icons in the Ethiopian church are not decoration. They are a door. Every line is a prayer, every colour a theology. Gold for divinity. Crimson for sacrifice. Black for mystery. When I first saw a kelaghayi, I could not speak for a minute. The buta motif — the teardrop flame — reminded me of the flame symbol in Coptic manuscripts. Two traditions that never met, reaching the same shape. I started testing natural dyes on silk a year before this project. I boiled madder root for days. My kitchen smelled like earth. The colour I got was exactly the red of the ceremonial robes at Lalibela — a red you cannot buy in a tube. You have to wait for it. The kelaghayi master will press my patterns into silk with a wooden stamp I could never carve myself with that precision. That is the right division of labour. I bring what I see in the light. They bring what their hands have known for five hundred years.
— Selam Tesfaye, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
The motif
Coptic cross — Ethiopian Orthodox
Ethiopia · Lalibela · 12th century
The Lalibela Collection
The Lalibela Collection
Orthodox iconography on silk · 15 pieces
15 pieces
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