Meet the Artist: Bina Shah

During a recent visit to the Royal West of England Academy (RWA) we met mixed-media artist Bina Shah, whose work featured in the Academician Candidates’ Exhibition 2025. She spoke with us about her background and creative journey, the ways the RWA has helped nurture her career, and the important role she believes Own Art plays in making original artwork more accessible to everyone.

Bina is a London-based artist who moved to the UK from her birthplace of Kenya in 1972. Having been raised in Kenya, her childhood memories are of the vivid East African landscape: “I have intense memories of the land – the very dry, vast savanna plains – and the colours of Kenya – that intense red ochre, which resonates with the Maasai’s robes. Most of my childhood was climbing trees and making mud cakes in a very natural, outdoor environment”

Coming to London in the early 70s, straight into her first English winter, was a shock to the young Bina. The skies were grey, the landscapes, colours and smells were all different, “but then you’ve got the beauty of the snow”, she said, “a sprinkling of snow in winter that had a certain kind of silence about it that I had never experienced before.” Those sensory memories from childhood are ingrained in Bina’s subconscious and always seem to find a place within her art.

“A connection with the land, and with the environments I’ve lived in, has always been important to me. Throughout my experiences of migration, those landscapes have been the one constant I can hold onto. They stabilise me, ground me… excuse the pun.”

Bina spent her school years in London and eventually enrolled at Harrow School of Art, where she completed her Art Foundation year plus a 3-year Diploma in Illustration. She remembers it as an exceptional course, offering a remarkably broad mix of creative subjects: from theatre and film to fashion, photography, ceramics, and printmaking. It exposed her to a wide range of artistic media at a young age and helped shape her early artistic voice.

At Harrow, she also took part in weekly life-drawing sessions, which trained her hand–eye coordination and introduced her to a variety of observational drawing techniques. These skills became essential to her rapidly developing illustrative style. Here, she also undertook a self-motivated project studying the lives of elderly residents in a care home, which deepened her understanding of the human condition in this setting. This experience inspired a series of drawings of her grandmother, portraying how she adapted to life as an elderly migrant in the UK.

Shortly after graduating, Bina landed her first commission with Roger La Borde’s card company, creating a collection of greeting cards and gift-wrap designs. These pieces were showcased in the window of a stationery shop in Covent Garden, where they caught the eye of a publisher from Shuckburgh Reynolds. Impressed, the publisher offered her the opportunity to illustrate the first Body Shop Book, which became Bina’s second major commission.

From the same publishing house came yet another remarkable project: an illustrated edition of Out of Africa by Karen Blixen.

“In those days, before email and the internet, you had to physically take your drawings and illustrations to a publisher. On the final day for submitting my work to one particular publisher, I noticed some photographs of Kenya on his desk. I assumed they were from a holiday and asked him about them. He looked surprised and asked how I knew they were in Kenya, so I told him I was born there and knew those places well“

“That’s when he mentioned that they were working on a new edition of Out of Africa and asked if I would like to illustrate it. I couldn’t believe it. It felt like such an honour – and an incredible coincidence – because I had always felt a deep connection to that book. It resonated so strongly with my own experiences.”

Soon after this project, Bina took a step back from illustration to work in her family’s business, where she took on the role of Head of New Product Development. This change of scenery allowed her to utilise her creative skills in a more commercial environment, using photography and graphic design to create packaging and marketing materials for the exotic products they shipped from around the world. In this role, she had many opportunities to travel, allowing her to discover and explore new countries and cultures.

After several years, Bina felt a strong pull back toward her creative practice. When she returned, she found that the illustration world had changed dramatically, and everything had become digital. Artists were now working in Photoshop and Illustrator rather than with pencils and pens, and it felt like an entirely new landscape, one she had never been trained for. “I dabbled in it for a while, but I felt a kind of disconnect,” she recalls.

“I’d always relied on the feel of the lines, the textures, the physicality of the materials – even the sound of pencil on paper. All of that was completely lost in the digital medium.”

Bina realised she needed to both “scale up” and “loosen up” her practice, so she immersed herself in a wide range of creative courses and workshops, from painting to printmaking. “Before, I had been working on a very small, limited scale, and these creative experiments encouraged me to think bigger. They led me to all sorts of discoveries. Now, most of my work is, I suppose, experimental, and the results can be such lovely surprises. I often find myself thinking, oh wow, how did I do that?”

The next step for Bina was to explore more site-based project work, so she began applying for residencies, eventually finding one in Ireland. After spending some time there, Bina begin to feel a deep connection with the land, the language and the people of Ireland – “I found the land, culture and people to share some connection with those, not only of Africa, but of places like India too. Even certain words in the language felt familiar and I quickly felt a kind of home in Ireland”. Many of her Irish residencies were done in the winter, experiences that Bina credits to the development of her more muted, monochromatic palette. She took this connection with the landscape a step further when she started making her own inks from pigments she had gathered in various places – “I found this helped me to give my work a sense of time and place”.

For example, one of the works she is exhibiting in the RWA 172 Annual Open Exhibition is a monotype titled Scláta 19 – Scláta meaning “slate” in Gaelic. For this piece, Bina sourced pigments from a quarry on Valentia Island in County Kerry, formed through the compression of ancient river sediments that produced the region’s remarkable slate. This material became the central focus of the work.

“As I drove away from the quarry, I saw a builder re-roofing a nearby house. He was stripping off the old, beautiful slate and replacing it with something synthetic. There was a pile of discarded material by the house, and I picked up a piece of each, the locally quarried slate and the synthetic version. Although the patina of each was quite different, there were certain similarities as well.”

When she began working with the foraged materials in her printmaking, Bina blended the pigments with her inks, giving them an entirely new texture and depth. She then applied these custom inks to Japanese washi paper, folded intuitively, before running it through the press. “It’s always a lovely surprise to unfold the paper,” she said. “The image created by the folds feels almost like a ghost, or a monoprint.” Bina went on to create an entire series of Scláta prints, each one offering a distinct impression of the materials and the landscape from which they were gathered. “It was such a beautiful journey; from visiting the quarry and collecting the pigments, to mixing the inks, and now having images that permanently remind me of that place and the time I spent there.”

Over the years, Bina has submitted her work to numerous RWA Open Calls and has been fortunate to have pieces selected for several Annual Open Exhibitions. This year, she was recognised, once again, by the Academy, earning a place in the Academician Candidates’ Exhibition 2025– a special section of the 172 Annual Open Exhibition from which new members are chosen to join the gallery’s prestigious Academician board.

“I am very lucky to have been selected as one of the 2025 Academician Candidates,” Bina shared, “It felt wonderful to see my work displayed alongside such strong and talented artists.” As a mixed-media artist who often incorporates crafting techniques such as stitching into her practice, Bina also expressed how much she values being part of an environment that elevates craft-based methods to the same level as more traditional art forms like painting. Additionally, Bina has been given the exciting opportunity to collaborate with the RWA’s gallery shop, where she will be selling some of her handcrafted bamboo pens, inks, and pigments (pictured above). She has also been invited to lead a workshop with the RWA Drawing School, offering participants the chance to engage directly with her distinctive creative process.

Bina spoke warmly about the support the RWA has provided throughout her career and the organisation’s significance within the creative community. “It’s a very inclusive space and a wonderful platform for artists,” she said, “helping to propel them into the next stage of their careers and creative development.”

The RWA is a member of Own Art, which means you can use the scheme to spread the cost of artworks in the 172nd Annual Open Exhibition, including Bina’s pieces. Our partnership with the RWA helps more people bring home the art they love, while also supporting the RWA – a registered charity – to increase sales and sustain the creative livelihoods of the artists featured in the exhibition. “I think Own Art is a fantastic scheme for people who want to buy art but can’t afford to pay upfront,” Bina shared. “It’s kind of like giving yourself pocket money to buy art.”

We believe that owning original art can enrich people’s lives, and Bina wholeheartedly agreed:

“It is so important to have original art around you. I like to compare it to reading a book on a Kindle versus holding a real, physical copy. Yes, a reproduction print can give you all the same content as the artwork it’s based on – just as a Kindle edition includes all the same words as the printed book – but the experience isn’t the same.

With original art, you’re getting a piece of the artist’s mind, their soul, made manifest in a painting, sculpture, or print. And it’s yours, you get to keep it. What an incredible privilege that is.”

Watch Bina speak about her work on our Instagram Reels

Learn more about Bina Shah

Visit her Website: www.binashah.co.uk
Follow on Instagram: bina5hah
Sign up for her RWA Workshop: Experimental Mark-Making and Paper Sculpture

Learn more about the RWA

Visit their website: www.rwa.org.uk
Follow on Instagram: rwabristol

Featured Artworks (in order of appearance)

Date & Fish – Roger La Borde Greeting Card
The Lord Mayor’s Dinner – Early illustrative work from Harrow School of Art
Drawing of Bina’s grandmother
Shaving – Illustrations for the Body Shop Book
Baoboab Tree, Front cover artwork & Cattle – Illustrations for Out of Africa by Karen Blixen
WINTER HEDGEROW II – Oil, Cold Wax, Peat Ash, Slate Dust, Mixed Media on panel (Purchase from the RWA for £3000, or £250 a month for 10 months with a £50 deposit with Own Art)
SCLÁTA 19 – Monotype & Mono print on Japanese washi paper (Purchase from the RWA for £875, or £87.50 a month for 10 months with Own Art)
PATHWAYS V – Collage with Print, Graphite, Sumi & Walnut ink, Graphite, Machine Stitch (Purchase from the RWA for £1200, or £120 a month for 10 months with Own Art)
Waterbuck – Illustrations for Out of Africa by Karen Blixen