Bianca Raffaella: Faint Memories
Flowers Gallery, London
12 February - 15 March 2025
Fast Fading, 2024
Acrylic on linen 210 x 150 cm
Photo © Antonio Parente, courtesy of Flowers Gallery
Viewless Wings, 2024
Acrylic on linen 210 x 150 cm
Photo © Antonio Parente, courtesy of Flowers Gallery
Movements Quite Forgot, 2024
Acrylic on linen 210 x 150 cm
Photo © Antonio Parente, courtesy of Flowers Gallery
Flowers Gallery announces the representation of Margate-based artist BIANCA RAFFAELLA and her first major solo exhibition, Faint Memories.
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 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. Bianca Raffaella relies on touch in her painting process. Never losing contact with the canvas, she blends delicate hues and dusty colours until they become an ethereal impression, cloudy details made with fingertips, brushstrokes or scrapes of a palette knife.
Bianca Raffaella's method is an intensive and spontaneous practice. She navigates the canvas with quick, expressive movements, capturing impressions of flowers 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, Bianca 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.
Photo © Antonio Parente, courtesy of Flowers Gallery
BIANCA RAFFAELLA - BIOGRAPHY
Bianca Raffaella (b. 1992, London) is a British artist and activist currently based in Margate. Graduating with a First-Class Honours degree in 2016, Bianca 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), Bianca Raffaella works in Margate, 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, Bianca 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 oneday solo exhibition as part of the programme’s 25th edition.
FLOWERS GALLERY
21 Cork Street, London W1S 3LZ
