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Bianca Raffaella is showing me the huge canvases she has painted for her debut solo show Faint Memories when a strange realisation hits me. I can see these beautiful depictions of petals and stems in their full, widescreen splendour – and she can’t.
The 32-year-old was born with congenital toxoplasmosis and is registered blind: her vision is largely limited to her left eye, through which she can only see things closer than a metre and for brief moments of time. “When I back away from a painting, I never see it in full,” says Raffaella. “I work really close, and I will see things for a fraction of a second and then it’s lost.”
Being partially sighted to such a degree can be an overwhelming and isolating experience, she says. Yet it hasn’t prevented her from becoming an artist. In fact, the works in this show all come from Raffaella’s attempts to convey her unique way of perceiving the world.
The paintings in Faint Memories focus on nature – flowers, petals, stems, sometimes in a ghostly white, at other times dotted with little bursts of colour. But spend time with them and you realise there’s more going on here than simple still lifes. The painting Viewless Wings (all the paintings are named after lines from John Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale) might look like an explosive bloom of dusty pink, green and white but it’s actually a depiction of just one flower. Raffaella has a condition called pendular nystagmus which means her eyeball, and hence her vision, is in constant motion. That one flower will move around, captured only for a brief moment at a time. “I see things in very short bursts, almost like a pulse,” Raffaella explains.
Elsewhere, Raffaella uses silver leaf paint in order to depict the light interference in her visual field (“there’s a constant kind of a halo or shard of white that comes into my field and I’m trying to see around it”) and thick impasto as a nod to her reliance on touch. With such limited sight, often Raffaella’s best way of observing a flower is through her hands.
“A small object in your hand has a vast amount of information,” she says, “but fully sighted people often don’t touch things because their sight is their primary sense.”
Viewers are not permitted to touch these artworks, although often they express a desire to do so. Raffaella is hoping to create a properly tactile work for her next show, maybe out of paper, that will slowly degrade as viewers interact with it – much like a flower eventually disintegrates after being rolled around in someone’s hand. Nature, sight, joy – Raffaella’s work reminds us that these things are transitory for all of us. She perhaps just has a keener sense of it: as a child reading braille, she remembers how the pages might last for only three or four reads before the fragile dots were pressed back into the paper surfaces.
Raffaella grew up around art – her mother is a painter, too, and Raffaella recalls feeling a closeness with Monet’s water lilies, which were painted when cataracts were limiting the French impressionist’s own vision (“He just picked out what he could see”). A decision to pursue fashion as a career ended up leaving her feeling creatively unfulfilled (“It was so commercial”). And so, during lockdown, she started painting seriously.
Raffaella has a unique way of working, scooping up acrylic in her hands and pushing it around the canvas with her fingers and thumbs. “Your hands are a great tool to use,” she enthuses. “The marks you can get with just, like, a thumb gesture or a scratch of a line.”
She stays close to the canvas, feeling her way around it, applying wet paint to a wet board. Raffaella likes to work quickly: ideally, a painting will be completed within a day because it’s all mapped out in her head and once things start to dry it’s harder to navigate. Sometimes, she can lose her place on the canvas – which is frustrating, but often helps relay her perspective more accurately. She points out to me how none of the flowers in her work are grounded – they float without soil or grass or even stems sometimes, a reflection of her untethered experience.
In 2023, Raffaella started a place at TEAR, the artist residency run by Tracey Emin, and she credits Emin – who was unaware of Raffaella’s backstory when she first saw her art – with having a “transformative” effect on her work: “I learned so much about who I wanted to be as an artist, what story I wanted to tell and how I wanted other low-visioned artists to be able to tell their own stories, too.”
During a recent talk about Raffaella’s work, Emin told the audience: “There are people who can see everything – they can see out into space with 20/20 vision. But they can’t make beautiful, soulful art.”
Indeed, while Raffaella’s paintings emanate the joy of nature, there’s also a sadness to them: she’s painting the world as she sees it, but also conveying a sense of what she’s lost. “I’m a really positive person,” says Raffaella. “But there are moments where I wish I could access things that I know, or can imagine, a fully sighted person will just take for granted.”
A partially sighted painter is not something everyone understands. Raffaella is often asked why she doesn’t turn to sculpture instead – to make use of her well-developed sense of touch. But there’s nothing more horrible, she says, than having clay drying over your fingers when you rely on them so heavily to interact with the world. Others have suggested that, with her limited vision, she could create abstract works instead, perhaps not realising that the artist behind these delicate paintings has a steely determination to her, too.
“Why would I be an abstract artist?” she says with a smile. “I want to paint what I relate to! Because when you paint what you relate to, that’s your purest identity.”
