Bio
Elizabeth McTernan is an American-born artist and writer based in Berlin and Iowa City and a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa, School of Art and Art History. Her work is a research-oriented and mixed-media exploration of measurement and media ecologies. Sometimes this involves a cartography of landscapes: mountains, deserts, the coastlines of islands or puddles. Other times it involves a cartography of objects: lab artifacts, crumpled pieces of paper, rocks. Through an interdisciplinary practice of mapping, she problematizes and plays with methods of empiricism to access the subjectivities from which knowledge is produced.
McTernan earned her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, MD, USA, and her MFA from Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany. Working regularly with scholars across fields, she is a contributor to the research group Experimenting, Experiencing, Reflecting (EER), an art-science collaboration led by artist Olafur Eliasson and scientist Andreas Roepstorff of Aarhus University in Denmark. Her work has been exhibited at Documenta 15, and her
recent paper “Andscapes: As the Bug
Crawls” was published in ScienceOpen as part of the conference proceedings for Politics of the Machines Berlin. McTernan has been granted numerous awards and residencies across Europe and the US, including a Kreativfonds Project Grant (Weimar, Germany); nomination to the Long List of the Preis der Nationalgalerie 2021 (Berlin, Germany); the Danish International Visiting Artist (DIVA) Grant; and residencies at Ars Bioarctica in Arctic Finland and Leitrim Sculpture Centre in Ireland.