In the News
We are delighted to announce that two of our recent collaborators have been selected for the Apollo 40 under 40 Craft edition 2024; artist Anya Paintsil and curator and author Ferren Gipson.
The pair have previously collaborated with Unit on the group show Within + Without, and most recently Anya Paintsil featured in the group show In Praise of Black Errantry held in Venice on the occasion of the Venice Biennale 2024.
Apollo praised Paintsil’s “playful yet discombobulating style” and referenced her “punch-needle embroidery and rug-hooking techniques with Afro hair-styling methods, using yarn and both human and synthetic hair on hessian to create works that can measure more than 2.5 metres wide.”
Discussing Paintsil’s work in the catalogue essay for In Praise of Black Errantry, curator Indie A. Choudhury (The Courtauld Institute of Art, London) spoke about the way her women defy expectations, and harness the women-centred knowledge of Welsh and Ghanaian folklore to channel a rich vein of storytelling:
“Paintsil’s women are not to be ignored. They demonstrate their right to be seen and heard; many of her figures are caught mid-animation – mouths open, limbs flailing – part of a story we might only partially grasp. Paintsil’s titles also capture a sense of a story in mid-flow, often in a shout or emphatic exclamation with either overly direct or slyly cryptic references in Welsh or English.
Nose bleeds, no back teeth and no eyebrows. I am a slow learner apparently. Except for knitting, picked that up in seconds (2023) presents the upper torso of a two-headed woman, her left arm and hand held aloft while her right arm is cut off, supporting the idea of a story in mid-narrative. Three pale hands emerge from the tufted background to clasp her hair, her right breast, and the neck of the left head. The asymmetry of the foreign hands aligns with the symmetry of the dual heads. The right head’s mouth has a tooth that looks as if it has just come ajar, given the blood on her mouth, while the left head’s nose bleeds. Her front teeth are capped in blue and gold. They/she is not an ordinary woman. Their multiplicity is constrained by the hands around them, but their weirdness refutes constraint. As a self-portrait, the two heads and engulfing hands signal the scrutiny of not fitting into a conventional or expected representation, whether Welsh and Ghanaian, woman, or artist.
Paintsil’s strange and oddly endearing characterisations are not so acute or extraordinary: a curving arm, a falling tooth, and a bleeding nose reminding us how narrow the visual parameters of female representation are. When comparing her upbringing in a predominantly white Welsh community to other people of colour in more diverse communities, Paintsil has stated that she felt like “an anomaly, or constantly questioned and stared at like the aliens had landed, I felt like I had grown up in an entirely different universe.” It is the simultaneous refusal of, yet revelry in, this alienation that allows us to enter into Paintsil’s universe.”
The 2023 group show Within + Without featured 12 contemporary artists working within the historically gendered mediums of textiles and ceramics, exhibited as an extension of Ferren Gipson’s research into the historical attribution of these media as ‘feminine’ and ‘traditional’ art forms for her book Women’s Work: From Feminine Arts to Feminist Art (2022).
In an excerpt from the introduction to Women’s Work, Gipson writes:
“The history of ‘women’s work’ has meant that mediums like textiles and ceramics have served as particularly potent tools to engage with feminist issues in modern and contemporary art. These mediums are fortified with a special capacity to express women’s stories and diverse perspectives through their historical associations with the feminine. For that reason, they are the perfect means of dismantling stereotypes, tapping into different experiences of womanhood and disrupting historically male spaces.
The artworks in the book and this exhibition are ‘women’s work’ in the most literal sense of having been produced by women and in representing mediums that have historically fallen under the umbrella of that label, but one must place their tongue firmly in cheek with regard to the term’s antiquated use in defining socially ‘appropriate’ activities for ladies. Women can and should do whatever-the-hell kinds of work they want.”
Read the full introduction to the book and accompanying essay to the exhibition here, and discover the full selection of artists, curators, collectors and thought-leaders included on Apollo’s 40 under 40 list here.
