Anya Paintsil (b. 1993, Wales UK) is a Welsh Ghanaian textile artist whose work brings together traditional craft, political storytelling and personal memory. Now based in Glyn Ceiriog after studying in Manchester and spending fifteen years in London, she draws on her childhood and adult life in rural North Wales as well as her ancestral Fante traditions of figurative textiles. Her practice combines techniques she learned growing up – rug making, appliqué and hand embroidery – with afro hairstyling methods to create large scale semi sculptural portraits.
Working with yarn, human and synthetic hair as well as discarded or repurposed fabrics, Paintsil builds tactile surfaces that blur the line between fine art and craft. Her use of found materials reflects her family’s ethos that nothing should go to waste, embedding generational values into the physical structure of her work.
Her portraits explore the possibilities and politics of non-representative depictions of the Black figure. Although her visual language is sometimes misread as a subversion of primitivism, Paintsil intentionally resists grounding her practice in the European fine art canon. Instead, she draws from traditional West African art forms such as carvings, masks and wooden sculptures, translating hard materials into soft fibres as a way of interrogating gendered labour, particularly the labour historically carried by working class women worldwide.
Her work is both playful and incisive. Familiar textile materials invite viewers in while the subject matter addresses themes of racism, trauma, identity and political personhood. Paintsil often describes textiles as a disarming medium that encourages closeness before revealing its sharper edges.
Paintsil’s work Spun Yarn, created in direct dialogue with Lubaina Himid’s British Pavilion commission, is featured in The Message is in the Pattern, the third Post National Digital Pavilion presented by Iniva and the British Council at the 61st Venice Biennale. Since her debut at the 1–54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London in 2020, Paintsil’s work has attracted sustained attention from collectors and institutions alike, entering major public collections including the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the National Museum of Wales, the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, and The Women’s Art Collection at Cambridge University.