Anya Paintsil

Anya Paintsil is a Welsh and Ghanaian textile artist who lives and works in Dyffryn 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.

Paintsil primarily works with discarded, found and repurposed fabrics.

Paintsil’s work Spun Yarn, created in 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. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘the delight of walking alone’ Glasgow International Festival 2026, and ‘Mamwlad’ Ames Yavuz 2026