Bianca Rafaella’s paintings dance and flicker. Recognizable forms such as flowers move into focus amid a sea of pale, ephemeral-seeming marks. These large canvases communicate the British artist’s unique way of seeing: She is partially sighted and experiences nystagmus in her left eye, which creates involuntary movement. “My work shows how someone with very little distance vision can interact with paint through a completely tactile process,” Rafaella said in an interview ahead of “Faint Memories,” her first major solo show, on view through March 15th at Flowers Gallery in London.
“My paintings show flowers, but they’re coming out of nowhere,” she continued. The artist doesn’t experience peripheral vision, which means objects in the world around her often appear isolated and untethered when viewed up close. “If you’re not fully sighted, you’re not grounded; you spend most of your life lost.”
She is drawn to flowers in particular as a symbol of finite beauty in the world that is often undervalued. “Sight is also finite, and we often don’t appreciate different layers of vision. My work is a conversation between these two important subjects,” she said.
Rafaella has always been creative, but during lockdown in 2020 she decided to refocus from her fashion design training onto painting. At the time, she was also having “mantra therapy,” a treatment for people with anorexia. This technique involved the artist making artworks that expressed her feelings and visualized the eating disorder as a physical thing. “It seemed to work for me, and I brought that creative tool into my own practice.”
Two years later, the artist applied for Tracey Emin’s T.E.A.R. residency program in Margate. The first project in the residency required intensive self-portraiture in front of a mirror. “The mirror was a new tool because I am so tactile,” she said. From there, she then started working with photographs other people had taken of her. It was only in 2023 that she began her series of floral paintings. The next year, Emin selected her for Flowers’s annual “Artist of the Day” show; she signed with the gallery shortly after.
Rafaella’s process is deeply rooted in physical touch, informed by her experience as a braillist until her late teens. She works close to her raw linen canvases, applying paint directly with her hands. The forms of the flowers are guided by handling real plants, which imbues the works with intricate detail. She first drenches the canvas in paint, then builds up almost imperceptibly thin layers. “I work quite quickly,” she said. “It’s just this intimate connection between the object and my mind.” She noted that, just as when she’s reading braille, her painting process requires constant physical contact with the surface in order for her to know her place within it. The resulting works come from the act of losing and finding her way: “I can quickly lose where I am on the canvas. But there’s something interesting about this inaccessibility of trying to search for something and get back to where I was at.”
For “Faint Memories,” she has explored ways of making her work accessible to other people who are visually impaired. She has written accompanying texts, which she has recorded herself reading out loud. These can be played through headphones. “It’s not descriptive, it’s more about the emotion behind the work and the idea of persistent vision,” she said.
Recorded voice was, in part, what inspired these works, she explained, referencing the influence of a recording of Benedict Cumberbatch reading John Keats’s poem “Ode to a Nightingale.” “The poem is about mortality and death, and the emotion of loss, and nature,” she said. “I was going through quite an intense period of neuralgia and I needed something that could tether me to a more positive space. Because I was in so much pain, I wanted to engage with something other than just the physical painting.”
This immersive feeling has created paintings that the viewer can get lost in. Their large scale creates the impression of a captivating space rather than a contained image. They require time to untangle, with forms slowly revealing themselves. “You have to move with the painting to get clarity,” she said, explaining that she hopes her works create a feeling of unease. “I think people will find it frustrating in a sense because they’re not able to grab hold of it.”
