Flowers Gallery has announced the representation of Margate-based artist Bianca Raffaella and the upcoming debut of her first major solo exhibition, Faint Memories, from 12th February to 15th March 2025.
A recent graduate of the Tracey Emin Artist Residency (TEAR), Bianca Raffaella creates evocative paintings, working from memory and sensory cues rather than direct observation. As a partially sighted artist, her ephemeral, floral and figurative paintings draw viewers into her world by capturing fleeting moments suspended in “persistent vision,” where her sight is in constant motion, and images appear only briefly as faint shadows or flickers of light.
Faint Memories features a collection of textural flower paintings that evoke the artist’s experience of beauty in braille, which was how she first learned to read and write. Raffaella relies on touch in her painting process. Never losing contact with the canvas, she blends delicate hues of blue, beige, and dusty pink until they become an ethereal impression, cloudy details made with fingertips, brushstrokes or scrapes of a palette knife.
Raffaella’s method is an intensive and spontaneous practice. She navigates the canvas with quick, expressive movements, capturing impressions of flowers and human figures as she explores themes of memory, perception, and fragility. As each painting unfolds, the viewer is invited to slow down, look closer, and engage with details that might otherwise go unnoticed. While deeply personal and complex, Raffaella hopes the exhibition sheds light on her experiences as a visually impaired artist and aims to make her work accessible and relatable to all viewers.
About the artist
Bianca Raffaella (b. 1992, London) is a British artist and activist currently based in Margate. Graduating
with a First-Class Honours degree in 2016, Raffaella was the first registered blind student to graduate from Kingston University with a degree in the Visual Arts. Since completing her 2023/4 residency at the Tracey Emin Artist Residency (TEAR), Raffaella now works from TKE Studios, where she uses gestural fragments and impasto techniques to capture motion and visual shifts on the canvas.
In 2021, Raffaella’s work was selected for the Royal Academy of Arts’ Summer Exhibition, coordinated by
Yinka Shonibare, followed by her solo exhibition, Hushed Impressions, at Orleans House Gallery in 2023.
She was also awarded the NatWest Entrepreneurship Funding Prize in 2019 for her bespoke sensory fashion label. An advocate for accessibility in the arts, Raffaella has shared her insights as a speaker at the GoetheInstitut’s Beyond Seeing project and as a panellist at Tate Modern’s Please Touch the Art talk. Most recently, she was selected by Dame Tracey Emin for Flowers Gallery’s 2024 Artist of the Day series, presenting a one day solo exhibition as part of the programme’s 25th edition.
