Elizabeth McTernan

Elizabeth McTernan is an artist and writer based in Iowa City and Berlin, and a professor of art at the University of Iowa. Working regularly with scientists and scholars across fields, McTernan is co-director of the interdisciplinary project Meandering River in Iowa City, and a core member of the research group Experimenting, Experiencing, Reflecting (EER), an art-science collaboration led by artist Olafur Eliasson in Berlin and anthropologist Andreas Roepstorff of Aarhus University in Denmark. McTernan often describes her work as a practice of mapping. Through a research-oriented process and multi-modal forms, she explores the ways that acts of observing and measuring an environment are always mediated by embodiment. In this way, McTernan’s works operate as ‘anti-maps’, records of her own fleeting experience of place and phenomena. Rather than providing a fixed image of a landscape, they resist completion and are entangled with time. Through this interdisciplinary practice of (anti)mapping, she problematizes and plays with methods of empiricism and media ecologies, accessing the subjectivities from which knowledges are produced. This research manifests in a variety of forms: drawings, performance scores, field guides, printmaking, electronics and sensors, soundscapes, sculptures, impractical tools, lyric essay, and performative actions across landscapes.

 

Image: detail of Scales of Attention, 2022-2024. Photo: Elizabeth McTernan.