Biography
Bianca Raffaella (b. 1992, London)
Working from memory and sensory cues rather than direct observation, Bianca Raffaella is a British artist and activist. As a partially sighted artist, her ephemeral floral and figurative works 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. Raffaella's ongoing series of textural flower paintings evokes 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. Her otherworldly gestures emerge through impasto and hand-painting techniques, which, for Raffaella, verge on the sculptural. 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.
In 2016, Raffaella was the first registered blind student to graduate from Kingston University in the Visual Arts, with a First-Class Honours degree, and was awarded the NatWest Entrepreneurship Funding Prize in 2019 for her bespoke sensory fashion label. In 2025 and 2021, Raffaella's work was selected for the Royal Academy of Arts' Summer Exhibition, coordinated by Farshid Moussavi RA and Yinka Shonibare, respectively. In 2023, her solo exhibition, Hushed Impression,s was shown at Orleans House Gallery. She completed a residency at the Tracey Emin Artist Residency (TEAR) in 2023/4 and 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. In 2025, Bianca Raffaella was awarded Overall Winner of the Women in Art Prize, and was also the recipient of Women in Art's Printing Prize.
An advocate for accessibility in the arts, Raffaella has shared her insights as a speaker at the Goethe Institut's Beyond Seeing project and as a panellist at Tate Modern's Please Touch the Art. She is a member of Layers of Vision and in 2025, participated in an All-Party Parliamentary Group for Eye Health and Visual Impairment, developing policy recommendations to guide the improvement of access and inclusion programmes for BPS people in UK-based museums.
