Freya Tewelde Eritrean, b. 1977

Freya Tewelde is a London-based interdisciplinary artist whose psychospiritual practice is rooted in painting and abstraction. She explores memory, ritual, and transformation through layered mark-making and ancestral inquiry, working primarily with powder pigment, oil sticks, and expansive colour fields that develop through accumulation, interruption, and return.

 

Born in Asmara, Eritrea and raised in Saudi Arabia, Tewelde draws on her diasporic experience, ancestral heritage, and background in the social sciences to examine the emotional and spiritual dimensions of identity and healing. Her work is informed by Abyssinian cosmologies, particularly rhythmic practices such as zema, and by thinkers including Ana Mendieta and Simone Weil, whose understanding of attention as spiritual practice shapes her approach to painting as a form of embodied inquiry. Working with the canvas on the floor, Tewelde allows gravity and bodily movement to shape each painting as a field of encounter, creating works that hold traces and uncertainty while resisting fixed meaning.