Anya Paintsil (b. 1993, Wales, UK) is a Welsh and Ghanaian textile artist who lives and works in London and Glyn Ceiriog. Drawing inspiration from her childhood in North Wales, and her ancestral, Fante tradition of figurative textiles, Paintsil combines craft practices she was taught as a young child; rug making, appliqué and hand embroidery with afro hairstyling techniques to create 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 made her debut at 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London in 2020, and since then has received sustained interest from private collectors and public institutions. Museum collections include Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, The National Museum of Wales, The Whitworth Gallery, Manchester and The Women’s Art Collection at Cambridge University.