Sheryl Watson

Artist Statement

Sheryl Watson is a Philadelphia-based visual artist whose work explores memory, absence, and inherited narratives through photography and mixed-media collage. Drawing from personal and familial archives, Watson investigates how identity is shaped not only by what is remembered, but by what is missing, fragmented, or erased over time.

Her practice often combines found imagery, archival documents, and contemporary photographs to construct scenes that exist between past and present. Figures may appear partially obscured, reconstructed, or silhouetted, reflecting the ways family histories are pieced together through stories, objects, and imagination rather than complete records.

Watson is particularly interested in the emotional weight carried by domestic spaces, institutional environments, and everyday gestures, places where private lives intersect with larger social systems. Her work considers how Black family histories are preserved, altered, or lost, and how women, especially, carry memory across generations.

Through collage, Watson treats the act of assembling as both method and metaphor: a way of honoring what remains while acknowledging what cannot be fully recovered. Her work invites viewers to slow down, look closely, and sit with ambiguity, asking how we remember those who shaped us when their presence is felt more than it is seen.