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. The hardcover book in English and German has been published by Verlag Kettler on the occasion of the exhibition at Sölring - Sylt Museum, island of Sylt, Germany. A 12 minute video of Sheehan reading chapter 1 in English may be viewed here. Deutsche Ausstellung Trailer. Installation at The Old Frisian House.