Bianca Raffaella. Faint Memories

About

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. 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. 

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.

The titles of the works are inspired by John Keats’s 1819 lyrical poem Ode to a Nightingale, which explores themes of beauty, imagination, and mortality. Embodying the emotional weight of navigating the world through touch and sound, Bianca Raffaella's paintings capture a profound sense of vulnerable solitude that can arise from this perspective alongside temporal joyous, playful moments of celebration and solace. 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. 

The exhibition will be accompanied by an audio guide narrated by Bianca Raffaella.