2025
Exhibition Residencies
My work is not performance, but rather non-vicarious gesture: something that has to be done to confirm the absurdity of being – something that has to be done to confirm that it’s not the end of the explorers. The prerogative is to interrogate the relationships between our pursuit of absolute knowledge, the aggravated rift between the world and its representations, and navigation of this perceptual and conceptual rift via direct bodily action in landscape. In the past year I’ve been working on several onsite, trans-disciplinary projects with thinkers and scientists between Copenhagen, Berlin, Newcastle, Vilnius, and Sevres. My body of research includes recent coastline measurements of a nameless Danish desert island, collection of data for the maximum distances vocal sounds travel across the Gobi Desert, 1:1 mapping of atomic and (un)earthly time, and finding the algorithm for the speed of the sound of a tree falling thousands of kilometers away and the resulting 6.5 hour walk to meet that sound. What can dry measurements of our world tell us about the lush human condition? Does stubborn precision affirm our existence or lead us further into unearthly abstraction? Can one reconcile the fugitive sublime with the subjective-temporal conditions that pitch our visions in the dirt?
Elizabeth McTernan was born in 1981 in Rhinebeck, NY, USA and graduated in 2004 from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD, USA with a BFA in General Sculptural Studies. Since 2003, she has been pursuing overland exploration in North America, Europe, Russia, and Central & Southeast Asia, processing it via mapmaking, drawing, actions, sound, and storytelling. Elizabeth's trans-disciplinary work has been exhibited internationally since 2005. Recent awards include the 2013 Danish International Visiting Artist grant, the 2012 Wassaic Project Education Fellowship, and a commission at the Karen Blixen Museum. In 2014, she will have three solo exhibitions, one with Toves Galleri in Copenhagen, another at the Leitrim Sculpture Centre in Ireland, and another at Gold + Beton in Cologne. Elizabeth currently lives, works, and walks in Berlin.
Past Residencies