Anya Paintsil is a Welsh and Ghanaian textile artist who lives and works in Glyn Ceiriog. Drawing inspiration from her childhood and adult life in rural North Wales, and her ancestral, Fante tradition of figurative textiles, Paintsil combines practices she was taught as a young child; rug making, appliqué and hand embroidery with afro hairstyling techniques to create semi sculptural large scale portraits. Paintsils’ figures explore the possibilities and politics of non representative depictions of the Black figure.

Often mistaken as subversion of ‘primitivism’, Paintsil deliberately and consciously refuses to root her work in the European Fine Art Canon, Paintsil’s visual language finds its basis in traditional West African Crafts and Art - carvings, wood sculptures, masks - exchanging the hard materials for soft, in an interrogation of gendered labour, particularly the labour of working class women.

Paintsil primarily works with discarded, found and repurposed fabrics  connecting to her family tradition of nothing going to waste.

Anya made her debut at 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London in 2020, and since then Anya has received sustained interest from private collectors and public institutions. Recent acquisitions include Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, The National Museum of Wales, The Whitworth Gallery, Manchester and The Women’s Art Collection at Cambridge University. Her work has been featured in publications such as Vogue, Vanity Fair, Forbes, The Guardian and Ocula.

Image courtesy Mary McCartney and Craft Magazine