The scallop shell in an angel’s hand is the symbol for Camino de Santiago: a pilgrimage leading to the cathedral in northwestern Spain that keeps relics of Saint James. The path is marked by yellow arrows and shells. On your way you might see fields of wheat, stray dogs, or other pilgrims who keep passports to accumulate stamps of the scallop shell emblem at important stops.

So if you are a pilgrim, the ten works here are the important stops, and The Angel of Pilgrimage will be your last stop. The angel comes out from under maybe an archway or maybe a tombstone, from a place accessible only by things like prayer and painting to hand you a shell as a token of completion.A pilgrimage really begins at your home and ends at the pilgrimage site.

Eden Seifu taught herself how to paint in her bedroom. And when the paintings were complete they became like windows out to landscapes and characters the artist had imagined but not seen until then. The act could be compared to some methods of transportation. Before or after a painting, Seifu will write directions in the form of poems to map out the image making process.

Eden Seifu is a figurative painter whose work takes an interest in depictions of the fantastical and surreal as mediums for the viewer to become intimate with the psychology of oneself and of others. In featuring people of color, especially Black people, as her subjects, she wishes to combat the historically exclusive tradition to depict only a small percentage of people as receptors of the most poignant and riveting human emotions. Seifu’s inspirations include romance novels, Russian symbolist paintings, illuminated manuscripts, adventure anime, comic books, and more.

Eden Seifu (b. 1996) was born in Boston, Massachusetts and lives in Seattle, Washington. She received a BA in Communication at the University of Washington, where she also studied Art History, in 2018. She has shown work at the Frye Museum and the Center on Contemporary Art in Seattle and has had paintings published in the University of Washington Bricolage Journal. Seifu has exhibited in recent group exhibitions at Cooper Cole, Toronto; Half Gallery, Los Angeles; The Valley, Taos; Qingdao Art Museum, China; Arsenal Contemporary, Toronto; and 8th House Projects, Mexico City. Pilgrimage to my room is her second one person exhibition with Deli Gallery.

Here are the directions back to the artist’s room:

Pilgrimage to my room

The pilgrimage to my room
Requires sock nor shoes
Nor compass nor map
In fact, it forbids all of that

The pilgrimage to the door
Marked, as Frank sung, Nevermore
Leads me through the valley
Of the shadow of my family

The pilgrimage to my bed
Where I hear the jinn dance overhead
Will wrench images from my body
Will render me obliterated, gone, nobody

You who have been made to walk
Through hallways innumerable
You who have daily fixed your gaze
Through a lifetime of windows

Will you find your destination in longing?
In the bliss of alienation, that mystic
Precipice named "isolation?"
Trace again and again the pathways of monks.

Trace again and again the pathways of monks,
Until, despite your separateness, you are infiltrated
With all the things of the world, joining your procession
Joining your parade towards the journey celebrated

Let the feet of the heart soften as they callous and say:
I love the sidewalks, those temporal and real
I love the streetlights and how the wind feels
I love when I get there, and when I get going
The pilgrimage to my room is all that is worth knowing.