Bio
I often describe my work as a practice of mapping. Through a research-oriented process and mixed-media forms, I explore the ways that acts of observing and measuring an environment are always mediated by embodiment. In this way, my works operate as ‘anti-maps,’ records of my 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, I problematize and play with methods of empiricism and media ecologies, accessing the subjectivities from which knowledges are produced.
McTernan is a Visiting Assistant Professor of art at the University of Iowa. She earned her MFA from Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany and her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, MD, USA. Working regularly with scholars across fields, McTernan is a core member of 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 academic texts have been published in the MIT Press Leonardo Journal and ScienceOpen. She has been granted numerous awards across Europe and the US, including a Big Field Fund grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation (Iowa City, US); nomination to the Long List of the Preis der Nationalgalerie 2021 (Berlin, Germany); the Danish International Visiting Artist (DIVA) Grant; and residencies such as Ars Bioarctica in Arctic Finland and Leitrim Sculpture Centre in Ireland.