Heather Sheehan is an American artist/writer who lives and works in Cologne, Germany. Her works combine elements of performance, textile sculpture, installation, video, black and white analogue photography, poetry and fiction in order to explore and present individual mythologies.

Heather Sheehan’s Sylta, the Whaling Widow Who Wails (2020–2024) is a visual and verbal narrative composed of a sequence of 40 black-and-white self-portrait photographs, a short story and the costume she sewed by hand. Isolated with an analogue camera and typewriter in a thatch-roofed house on the coast of an island in the North Sea, Sheehan found herself in the role of a whaling captain’s pregnant widow. With the short story, Meeting Sylta, she reveals the stunning synchronicity between a fiction and the experience of its creation.