Anya Paintsil’s Giantesses Walk Free
The delight of walking alone · Burns Street Studios, Glasgow · 5–21 June 2026
The Welsh-Ghanaian artist Anya Paintsil makes portraits you want to touch. Working in rug-making, appliqué, hand embroidery, and afro hairstyling techniques — craft practices she learned as a child — she builds large-scale figures from soft, intimate materials.
For her Glasgow International show, Paintsil draws on North Welsh folklore to conjure giantesses: joyful, powerful Black women who delight in their freedom across the hills and swamps of the landscape. Their power and strength subvert archaic ideals of femininity, questioning the absurdity of one body type to which every woman is meant to aspire.
It is, fittingly for summer, a vision of women entirely at ease in their own enormity.
