By Design: Anya Paintsil

When Anya Paintsil says, “I’ve been a hobbyistartist, a student artist and a professional artist,” you could be forgiven for assuming that a certain number of years have passed. But Paintsil, who makes compelling textile portraits using traditional rug-hooking techniques, is just 28. Thanks to a combination of the pandemic and Instagram, she started selling her work before she graduated from Manchester University in 2020. By 2021, she had shown successfully at both Ed Cross’s London gallery and at Salon 94 in New York. “Both Ed and Jeanne Greenberg [of Salon 94] found my work on Instagram during the first lockdown,” she says. “And that really opened up the art world to someone like me with no connections. But the pieces look twice as good in real life. There’s so much more depth.”

Indeed depth defines her practice. The Welsh and Ghanaian artist grew up among farmers; her work is imbued with her dual heritage and the crafts of her rural upbringing. Her chosen medium – latch-hooking, needlepunching – is one traditionally born of necessity, allowing small amounts of thread to create hardy, useful rugs and cover. But it is also laborious. For Paintsil, that is the exciting part. “Working on a piece is like solving a problem, and is what I like most about being an artist,” she says.

Meanwhile her subject matter is highly personal. Taken from photographs of herself and her family, her large-scale 3D wallworks deliberate on issues of race and identity, and incorporate both human hair and exhausted artificial braids – part artistry, part visceral narrative.

The series of works she made while still at university are in shades of pink, black and brown, with titles in Welsh that refer to her lived experience. “I didn’t grow up around many Black people, and it still offends me that people are so shocked to hear that Welsh is my mother tongue,” she says. More recent works delve into the storytelling culture of her father’s native Ghana, including the tale of folklore character Kwaku Anansi. “My dad used to tell me the story at night, about the man who disguised himself as a spider, or Anansi,” she says. “He’s a bit of a wide boy, a colorful character.” The change in subject encouraged a change of palette, and she has been working with vibrant lilac and green backgrounds that glow almost neon on the wall as the light fades in a room.

Paintsil will have a show at Hannah Traore Gallery in New York from this November. The subjects are to be decided but, she says, “I love stories and fantasies, and I am still exploring what it means to be who I am and how to celebrate my dual identity.”