Bio
I consider the dataset a site of ecological storytelling. There is no such thing as ‘pure’ data: anyone collecting data, whether scientist or artist, chooses tools that determine what is perceived. They also create interpretive structures to understand their data, and by extension the world. To me, these tools have their own agency, which is emphasized in the context of sculpture: my objects are subjects in themselves and generate situated knowledges. Data is often received as cold, authoritative, and distinct from subjectivity. I borrow scientific methods to invent artistic, idiosyncratic modes of data collection and interpretation that are visceral and uncanny. I position my performances as invitations to join me in figuring something out. My practice is meant to bring artistic rigor to interdisciplinary research with depth, curiosity, and serious play. I hope to contribute to an aesthetics of embodied connection to landscape, bringing together environmental ecology with media ecology to cultivate more-than-human empathy.
Elizabeth McTernan is an artist and writer based in Iowa City. She is an Assistant Professor of Art and the Head of the Sculpture and Intermedia program at the University of Iowa. McTernan earned her MFA from Bauhaus-Universität in Weimar, Germany, and her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, MD, USA. Her multi-modal process-driven practice engages the dataset as a site of ecological storytelling. Working regularly with scientists and scholars across fields, McTernan is a core member of "Experimenting, Experiencing, Reflecting" (EER), an art-science research collaborative founded by artist Olafur Eliasson in Berlin and anthropologist Andreas
Roepstorff of Aarhus University. McTernan's work has been exhibited at Documenta 15 and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, and her writing has been published in the MIT Press Leonardo Journal, ScienceOpen, and Brink Literary Journal, among others. The recipient of numerous awards across Europe and the US, McTernan has earned a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation, a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) grant, the Danish International Visiting Artist (DIVA) grant; a nomination to the Preis der Nationalgalerie 2021 (Berlin, Germany); and residencies such as Nida Art Colony in Lithuania, Ars Bioarctica in Arctic Finland, and Leitrim Sculpture Centre in Ireland.