SHEILA KRUGER

Sheila Kruger is a Brazilian collage and visual artist, psychoanalytic art therapist

specializing in elderly individuals living in long-term care homes, and social worker.

Born in Santa Catarina and currently based in Campinas, São Paulo, her practice

unfolds through memory, silence, mystery, and the feminine experience.

Her work emerges from an ongoing engagement with what time leaves behind:

fragments, traces, shadows, and suspended presences that persist beyond

disappearance. Memory, in her practice, is not linear or complete, but unstable,

intimate, and deeply sensory. It survives through fleeting impressions—a scent, a

faded photograph, a carefully preserved dress, the dust settling upon a forgotten

object.

Rather than presenting memory as recollection alone, Kruger approaches it as a

living territory where absence and presence coexist. Her work searches for the

fragile remnants of the invisible: the lived, the lost, the silenced, and the imagined.

Through collage and assemblage, she constructs poetic spaces in which absence

acquires form and forgotten narratives resurface. Each composition becomes an

attempt to approach something intangible—an echo, a longing, a persistence that

resists erasure.

A significant part of her artistic investigation is devoted to women’s histories and to

the ways memory is transmitted across generations. Photographs, fabrics, lace,

letters, and domestic artifacts become vessels of lived experience. Within these

materials reside stories interrupted, overlooked, or erased by time and social

structures.

Rather than merely revisiting the past, Kruger reimagines it. Her works propose new

narratives of resilience, transformation, and permanence while acknowledging the

marks left by history. The female figures inhabiting her compositions are neither

nostalgic nor idealized; they are reconstructed, opening spaces for new possibilities

of existence without erasing the traces they carry.

Her collages and assemblages may be understood as landscapes of memory—

spaces where the past continues to whisper and where fragments of women’s lives

are reborn through delicacy, poetry, silence, and mystery.

Each artwork is accompanied by a carefully selected poem, establishing a dialogue

between image and language. Through this encounter, visuality and lyricism intertwine,

inviting the viewer into a contemplative and deeply intimate experience.

Kruger’s creative process is guided less by rational selection than by intuition and

emotional resonance. Images and objects seem to choose one another, generating

unexpected associations and symbolic relationships.

Her practice unfolds through freedom, imagination, and the unconscious. Much like

a psychoanalytic session, seemingly disconnected elements gradually reveal

hidden meanings and emotional connections. The work emerges as an expression

of inner movement—a gesture of desire, remembrance, and transformation.

Initially working primarily with paper and printed imagery, Kruger gradually expanded

her material vocabulary to include textiles, lace, found objects, and fragments of

broken porcelain, developing a body of assemblage work alongside her collages.

Many of these materials originate from her personal archive, particularly objects

inherited from her maternal grandmother, Mary, whose presence remains central to

her emotional and artistic universe. These objects function as symbolic bridges

between past and present, carrying both personal and collective memory.

Kruger also searches for overlooked treasures in antique markets, thrift stores,

second-hand bookshops and flea markets. Treasures whose histories remain only

partially visible. Through the collection, preservation, and transformation of these

fragments, she creates works that invite reflection on memory, identity, loss, and

continuity.