Spun Yarn by Anya Painstil

Anya Paintsil

Spun Yarn (2026)

Anya Paintsil’s Spun Yarn begins from a question of how connection is sustained in places where formal infrastructures of care are thinly distributed, and where community life is held together instead through informal, word-of-mouth exchange. Set across Wrexham and Glyn Ceiriog in North East Wales, the work listens to the ways Black residents navigate landscapes in which spaces such as salons, African grocery shops, or long-standing community hubs are largely absent, and where forms of belonging are continuously negotiated through everyday encounters.

Rather than working within the more structured dynamics of institutional settings, Paintsil shifts her practice into the town centre itself, approaching people directly and inviting them into the tactile act of braiding hair. The gesture is deliberately intimate: she uses her own finger as an anchor point, insisting on proximity and attention in a process that might otherwise be mechanical. In this closeness, conversation unfolds. Participants speak about migration, isolation, care, and the search for spaces where their hair – and by extension their identities – can be held without refusal. These exchanges become central to the work’s material, with stories such as Natalie’s experience of being turned away from salons as a child, or Grace’s continued journeys to Manchester for hair care, or Ronnie and Leona’s domestic practices of maintenance and care.

The title Spun Yarn draws on maritime traditions in which sailors would tell stories while making rope, turning labour into narration, repetition into memory. This resonance is important: it frames the braid as accumulated speech, formed through repetition throughout time. In this sense, the work also speaks to what Stuart Hall, drawing on Franz Fanon’s vocabulary, describes as the “epidermalization” of racial identity, where the surface of the body becomes a site through which histories are read, inscribed, and contested. Here, hair becomes both material and archive, holding traces of refusal, adaptation, resilience and self-expression, as a way of translating cultural practices and forge identity.

In its digital life, Spun Yarn shifts again. Paintsil overlays drawings onto photographic documentation of the work, introducing animations that seem to emerge from within the work itself. These interventions do not add new narratives so much as reveal what was already present: the sense that the object is never fully still. In this translation, the work moves between tactile encounter and digital animation, holding together labour, intimacy, and the fragile infrastructures through which stories continue to circulate.

Anya Paintsil

Anya Paintsil 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.