Ames Yavuz is pleased to present mamwlad, the first solo exhibition by Welsh-Ghanaian artist Anya Paintsil with the gallery.

mamwlad, meaning motherland in Welsh, marks a return for the artist to the Ceiriog Valley in North Wales after living away for 15 years. Inspired by Ghanaian figurative textiles, the fibre and textile-based works develop her unique artistic vocabulary using labour-intensive craft traditions such as rug knotting, punch needle and tufting, and Afro hair styling. In the exhibition mamwlad, a rich portrait of her hometown and herself emerges alongside hidden textures among leftovers and debris made using materials sourced from family members, local clothing resellers, crafts stores and the over 350-year-old house that serves as her new homestudio. Paintsil’s motherland is not pastoral, nostalgic or romantic, but grounded in the idiosyncrasies of its lived realities. Here, village scandal, rumour and social history become the basis of a contemporary mythology. Its characters include a recently established peacock population in the valley, dividing public opinion; usually uncommon Green Hairstreak butterflies abundant among the Buddleas of the neighbourhood; and mysteriously murdered sheep, often maggot infested. These particular confluences of human and natural worlds, with equal measures of beauty and ugliness, life and death, anchor the artist’s stories. In this world, the absurd, brutal and gross are embedded in the everyday, and is experienced with delight.

YOU AND ME BOTH BABES, the artist titles a work with a figure with a dead pheasant, victim to an outbreak of bird flu in the valley. BORE DA WAKEY WAKEY, “Good Morning” in Welsh, titles a work with two of the thriving feral peacock population delighting and irking their human companions with early morning cries.

The often-alienated Black figure of Paintsil’s earlier works, often literally unmoored in empty space, finds itself among new supports and garb in ‘mamwlad’. A lilac hue recurs in the found, sometimes dyed, polycotton backings of many of the works, evoking the valley’s ubiquitous grey slate, lichen and the fog through which the sky takes on a glowing haziness. Paintsil speaks of rediscovering the “profound beauty” of the region’s temperate Celtic rainforests, with rare communities of insects, mushroom and mould. In BROTHERS, twin figures representing Paintsil’s half-brother find themselves in this setting, at a memorial forest with trees planted in memory of his mother.

The return also meant re-finding kinship among the “island” isolated Black milieu in rural Wales, distinct from established Black communities in urban England, the latter still alienating for the rural-Wales-raised artist, despite the former’s often-overt racism. Communities connect over Whatsapp texts, for example, and Paintsil renders their micro political, cultural economic mundanity in a work narrating a controversial sale of two goat heads made on the group, reported later as rotten. SMELLS OF POOR CUSTOMER RELATIONS, the disgruntled buyer’s comment on the group finds itself in the title of the work, representing a figure cradling the goat heads among a field of flowers. “I couldn’t even think of making a work that could not bring me joy,” Paintsil attests.