About

Raisa was born in Pembrokeshire, South Wales, in 1977. She received her first-class Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in 2015 from the CASS School of Art and Design, Whitechapel, London, collecting the annual dissertation prize.

Raisa is a prominent British multidisciplinary and multi-concept conceptual artist, filmmaker, and researcher whose work explores the raw complexities of mental illness, trauma, liminality, shame, and guilt. Born in Pembrokeshire, South Wales, in 1977, she has garnered significant national acclaim within the UK contemporary art scene for her provocative and deeply personal critiques of art theory and structural psychiatric norms.

Core Artistic Practice & Concepts

She often channels her personal battles with severe anxiety and compulsive ritualistic behaviours, approaching her practice through what she terms the perspective of the "lunatic". She creates physical and visual pieces that function as "anti-psychiatry" tools to challenge established cultural frameworks of psychological distress. Her primary conceptual mechanics include:

Medium Fluidity: She works across diverse mediums, including ceramics, performance, analogue film (Super 8 and 8mm), coloured ink grids, and text.

Weaponised Nostalgia: She utilises nostalgic motifs as a physical currency to trigger dialogues about a disquieting mind, deliberately separating nostalgia from mere pleasant reminiscence.

The Fragility of Art Theory: She frequently integrates parody and institutional critique into her work. One of her most famous prize-winning pieces involved six months of writing a continuous essay exploring the fragility of art theory directly onto rolls of toilet paper.

Major Academic Profiles & Accolades

Watkiss boasts an accomplished background combining studio practice with rigorous historic-literary research:

The Graduate Art Show (2023): Won the prestigious National Graduate Award in London, gaining widespread recognition and a £1,000 award for her satirical approach to contemporary art institutions.

Doctoral Research: Serving as a doctoral researcher at Loughborough University, her thesis analyses Liminality as Method: Passing as a Mode of The Lunatic’s Transition

She blends these historic texts to map out how contemporary mental health exists as a "liminal space".
Education: Graduated with a first-class BA (Hons) in Fine Art from the CASS School of Art and Design in London, where she secured the annual writing prize, followed by a Master of Arts with Distinction from De Montfort University.

Selected Works & Exhibitions

Direction of Flow (2026): Featured in the Two Queens members' exhibition in Leicester, this analytical A1 grid-pen piece tracked frame-by-frame how everyday gallery viewers navigated physical plinths placed at the Stonebow in Lincoln.
The Suicide Fantasies of Raisa Watkiss Series: Ongoing experimental moving-image video installations, broken into separate cantos (such as Canto No. 1: Suicide by Drowning and Canto No. 2: Suicide by Jumping), explicitly confront intense psychological states through dark, conceptual video art.
Where the sea almost but not entirely meets the land: A curated series of 12 images derived from deep algorithmic search patterns and "AI-signed" to serve as a parody of modern propaganda and automated art generation