Sherie Margaret Ngigi
b. 1996, Kenya · Lives and works in Nairobi, Kenya
Sherie Margaret Ngigi is a Kenyan visual artist, fine art photographer and filmmaker whose practice functions as an intimate and evolving visual archive of lived experience. Working primarily through conceptual and staged photography, she draws on personal memory and the social realities around her to examine identity, adulthood and womanhood. Women have remained central to her practice since she began working with photography in 2015, with the act of photographing other women often becoming a means of reflecting on her own position and experience.
Her earlier bodies of work address the expectations and pressures placed on women within Kenyan society. Series including Mke Mwema and Murky Waters consider marriage, prescribed social roles and the boundaries within which women are expected to live, while other works engage with mental health, self-perception and the relationship between individual experience and wider social structures. Ngigi frequently uses carefully constructed gestures, costumes and environments to move beyond documentary description, creating images in which personal experience becomes a point of entry into broader questions of gender and identity.
Her more recent practice has expanded toward mortality, memory and impermanence. In Forever Is Not Ours, hazy and spectral portraits confront the inevitability of death while resisting its representation solely through fear or darkness. Across these different bodies of work, vulnerability operates not as a fixed condition but as a space through which transformation, resilience and self-understanding can emerge.