About

I’m Marcia Chinyei, working under the name MARACHI. I’m a Sheffield-based artist of Jamaican heritage, and my paintings focus on the inner, often unspoken emotional lives of Black women. I’m drawn to quiet moments, the spaces between overwhelm and calm.

 

I work mainly in acrylics, painting figures whose bodies and expressions carry more than they say. Posture, gaze, and hair are central to how emotion shows up in the work. The locs in my paintings aren’t just a hairstyle; sometimes they shift, float, and stretch into shapes that reflect thought, mood, or memory. I show them deliberately unmanicured, embracing the natural form of Afro hair and allowing it to exist freely, without refinement or apology. Often, the hair carries symbolic weight, showing thought, mood, or memory.

 

My work is shaped by lived experience and by the visual language of Jamaican culture and the wider Black diaspora. I’m influenced by the natural hair and loc communities, by the everyday presence of Afro hair worn in its own texture and rhythm, and by the vivid use of colour that runs through those spaces.

 

Ultimately, I make work for people who feel deeply. I want the paintings to offer moments of quiet recognition — places where tenderness, introspection, and resilience are allowed to exist without needing to be justified.

See selected and upcoming Exhibitions here