Heather Sheehan

US artist Heather Sheehan, who has lived in Cologne since the mid-1990s, combines elements of performance, textile sculpture, installation and video art, analog black and white photography, poetry and narrative in her work to explore and present individual mythology.

For her project Sylta, the whaler's widow who cries (2020-2024), the artist combined a sequence of 40 black and white self-portraits, a short story and the costume she sewed herself into a visual and verbal narrative. Isolated with an analog camera and typewriter in a thatched house on the coast of an island in the Wadden Sea of the North Sea, Sheehan felt herself transported into the role of a pregnant widow of a whaling captain. In the short story Ich bin Sylta, she reveals the startling synchronicity of experiencing fiction during the creative process.