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.
