heather sheehan

heather sheehan

  • hello
  • artist statement
  • intro
  • selected works
  • current works
    • visual-verbal works
      • Sylta, the Whaling Widow Who Wails
      • One Woman, One Stone
      • Sharpless, Margaret
      • burlap poem video
      • 2021 box edition
      • live readings
      • installed texts
    • b & w photography
      • monograph
      • Self Portrait with Ear to Future & Past
      • In Muddier Years
      • Island- Burying the Dead
      • Washday on the River
      • Farm
      • Institutional
    • video + performance
    • textile installation + object
    • stitched drawings
    • on paper
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    • intro text
    • textile installation + object
    • on paper
    • photography
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Walka Walka
1992-93
glued belting leather, acrylic fur
20 x 16 x 16 cm

This sculpture was first exhibited in a show curated by Klaus Honnef at the Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn. In text from the 1993 catalog: For the exhibition, I created a shoe object which alludes to the sexual references that are often attributed to female shoes. The name "Walka Walka" comes from a cat call that men make, often combined with a whistling sound, mimicking the rhythmic swaying of the hips of a passing woman. This shoe-pair-object radiates seductive power: shoe body as body cavity, as symbol of the womb, the red lining, the uterus, the vagina. One shoe is twisted in such a way that it can dip its heel into its own toe - a masturbation, the safest form of "safe sex". 

Photo: Viola Sophie


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