• hello
  • selected works
  • themed projects
    • intro text
    • Sylta, the Whaling Widow Who Wails, 2024
    • stitched drawings
    • One Woman, One Stone, 2023
    • Sharpless, Margaret, 2021
    • a Weighing, 2019
    • weaving on paper
    • I Shot Myself in Augsburg, 2018
    • SeamStress, 2017
    • institutional, 2017
    • alighting, 2015
    • In Muddier Years, 2015
    • (w)hole, 2014-2015
    • Barking the Willow, 2012 - 2015
  • artists books
  • b & w photography
    • intro text
    • cropped, 2017
    • Self Portrait with Ear to Future & Past, 2016
    • Confessions of a Bishop's Housekeeper, 2016
    • For Esmé with Love and Squalor, 2016
    • The Smallest Room, 2016
    • dreaming of escape, 2015
    • Island- Burying the Dead, 2015
    • Crying Wolf, 2013
  • earlier works
    • intro text
    • visitors and other beings, 2004-2011
    • soulfood, 2003
    • each & every, 2003
    • grace, 2002
    • single opening, 1999
    • Universal Mother, 1996
    • on pink, 1995
    • Walka Walka, 1992
  • about
    • artist statement
    • biography en + de
    • interview texts
    • wikipedia
    • cv
    • publications
    • videography
  • contact
single opening video 08:15
1999

"...Sheehan confronts us with artificial and injured, manipulated and changeable parts, their origin or future purpose being at once strange and familiar. With tubes, needles and clamps attached, they are pampered, taken care of and left to develop into something we can not fathom. In cool laboratory atmosphere, they awaken motherly instincts: will they survive, or will they remain dependent upon the apparatus and constant care, kept in services of research? These are the questions not only scientists are concerned with but which fill us all with a mixture of enthusiasm and fear.

... Sheehan herself appears as Prof. Dr. Nurse. In her grotesque performance, she acquaints us with her research into the attempts to revive an absurd, extinct creature, the Maboutae, whose practical characteristic it is to necessitate only a single opening for all vital functions. Sheehan sarcastically caricatures odd fields of research and our amateurish ideas of the possibilities genetic technology holds, as well as the economic advantages."

2001, Cornelia Bruninghaus Knubel, co-curator: Under the Skin - Biological Transformations in Contemporary Art, Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum - International Center for Sculpture, Duisburg, Germany.


Copyright Heather Sheehan, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Authors and Photographers.