This image is highlighted in Klaus Honnef's essay, published in 2015 in Heather Sheehan Photographic Works 2012 -2015.

"“Barking the Willow” is the comprehensive title of a cycle of photographs balanced in a line of single images and triptychs. One single image from the group of works appears to especially illuminate for me the art of Heather Sheehan’s practice. Shot from the level of the hip it shows the thigh and calf of a leg and, in the right upper corner, a comparatively tiny foot, as if it were merely a foreign appendage. The foot hovers over an abyss in palpable distance from the planks of a bridge which as of yet, still provide support to the unseen portions of the body. From the right, the leg, or to be more exact its stump, extends dominantly into the frame and like a deformed hulk possesses nearly all of the left side of the photograph.

The image is remarkable in two respects. On the one hand, it evokes a climate of latent danger and sets the scene for the rank, ubiquitous dizziness to which Alfred Hitchcock devoted his masterpiece “Vertigo” (actually his entire oeuvre). Due to the rash foreshortening of perspective, we are unwillingly sucked into the depth of the abyss. On the other hand, the distorted optic accentuates the image even more drastically than the films of the ‘master of suspense’. The force of gravitational pull that draws us in despite the laws of physics, thrusts us well and truly into the deep. Adding to the disturbing impression is the fact that the mass of the leg appears slightly out of focus, while by contrast the foot and bridge elements are clearly contoured and vividly articulated. With this emphatic employment of visual flaws owing to the selection of a lens that no ordinary photographer would permit, Heather Sheehan explicitly refers back to the photographic medium and its modalities. In so doing, she testifies to her conscious discourse with the photographic medium. Undeniably, the image is an example of photographic art."