Performative action and an edition of 6 lithographs
Nida, Lithuania, and Berlin, Germany
50 x 36 cm
2015–2016


A friend told me a story of a conversation he overheard once when he was sailing. Two people were standing on the deck of a boat in the middle of the ocean, looking over the bow, out over the water. One of them turned to the captain and asked, “Where’s sea level?” They were not more than a couple meters from the sea surface, and yet there was an assumption of an absolute sea level that transcended their very real, situated experience of sea level.

Mulling over this question, I built a “high-resolution map-making apparatus” out of wood and acrylic glass. I took it down to the beach, placing it directly on the line between the land and sea. As the waves lapped onto the beach, I traced their limits and accumulated a collection of lines, recording the change in the coastline over the course of one hour. This document was later transcribed as lithographs, etching the fleeting coastline into stone.

Finding Sea Level

C-print mounted on alu-dibond
90 x 73 cm
+
Ink and pencil on paper
6@ 170 x 150 cm

A photograph of a puddle – taken at Cabo de Roca in Portugal – was printed at 1-to-1 scale and then traced and measured with different units of measure, which resulted in radically different totals for the perimeter. This is a cartographic problem known as the “coastline paradox.” The coastline paradox is the counter-intuitive observation that the coastline of a landmass does not have a well-defined length. This results from the fractal-like properties of coastlines. More concretely, the length of the coastline depends on the method used to measure it. Since a landmass has features at all scales, from hundreds of kilometers in size to tiny fractions of a millimeter and below, there is no obvious limit to the size of the smallest feature that should not be measured around, and hence no single well-defined perimeter to the landmass.

For instance, if it were possible to wind an infinitely small measuring tape around every single pebble and grain of sand on an island’s – or puddle’s – perimeter, the coastline’s seemingly finite length would actually unfurl into millions upon millions of kilometers. The more precise mapping becomes, the more challenges it presents to quantification.

Fleeting Sea: Measuring the Coastline of a Puddle

Paint on copper
5 @ 40 x 50 cm
Installation view of exhibition at HilbertRaum, Berlin
2018

Copper is the metal of our telecommunication infrastructure, of our speed. It is also a “native metal,” one that can be pulled directly from the earth with no further transformation. It both possesses a metallic stolidity and is so soft that it can take on organic forms. In this series, the white grid drawn on the surfaces of the copper sheets tightens from field to field. A transformation is underway, from an almost pure copper landscape to a surface more resembling wrinkled paper. Like a map, at first the territory of the copper is marked out and readied for measurement, but as the resolution increases from piece to piece, the dense map lines overtake and obscure the very surface they aim to quantify.

Copper Fields

Copper paint on rocks collected from the Baltic Sea coast in Nida, Lithuania; plinth, light fixture
Dimensions variable
Installation view at KN: Raum für Kunst im Kontext, Berlin
2017

Micro-Planetary Territories, I-IX

Cyanotypes mounted on alu-dibond behind acrylic
9@ 10 x 10 cm
Installation view at Horse & Pony, Berlin
Finland, 2016

These are cyanotypes, each made by placing photo-chemically treated paper flat on the earth, laying a line drawing on transparent film over it, and exposing it to sunlight over several minutes. They were made during the vernal equinox in Finland.

Sun Collaborations: Shadows cast by objects high in the sky on the Equinox as the Earth stands up to the Sun

Aerial photographs (1943–2013), courtesy of the Royal Danish Library, Copenhagen, Denmark
C-print mounted on MDF, oil paint
21 x 15 cm
2013–2014

The Birth of a Nameless Island (#9 of 20)

Field studies, drawings, and published artist book
A nameless island, Odense Fjord, Denmark
2013–2016

An expansion of my earlier project measuring a puddle, this research was done with a nameless island in Denmark that had recently emerged from the sea. Measurements were made with rope, thumbs, hands, and arm’s lengths. Again, using different units of measure generated many different perimeter totals. Even establishing the boundary between land and sea was not so easy – my team and I were relentlessly foiled by the fickle shoreline, its tiny, vulnerable perimeter made dramatically dynamic by the tides, waves, and rotting seaweed. Here, the fieldwork, on one hand, fell apart as science and, on the other hand, emerged as ontological situation, framing paradoxes of empiricism and imperialism: Cartography’s legacy of human empire and knowledge was momentarily dissolved in the relationship of body to shore, in a collapse of map and territory.

The Coastline Paradox: Measuring a Nameless Island

Cyanotype on watercolor paper in acrylic box frame
100 x 100 cm
Installation view at Horse & Pony, Berlin
2016


Made by placing photo-chemically treated paper flat on the earth and exposing it to natural sunlight over several minutes while floating and turning a black square over the center, Floater is like an oversized cyan pixel, wherein an old photographic printing technique calls up the particulate-matter of the digital realm. Cyan is both the chemically-expressed color of the cyanotype process and the artificial color of the oceans of satellite mapping, a la CMYK. The spatial nature of the photo-process itself suggests a collapse of the space between the sun and the paper, the sky and ground. The title Floater also refers to “eye floaters,” which are shapes in a person’s vision that seem to float away when the person tries to look directly at them, caused by gel-like fluid in the eye itself.


Floater

Iron, wood, radiometer, and light fixture
25 x 145 x 125 cm
2017


A low lamp affects a radiometer (a device that measures the radiant flux of electromagnetic radiation), causing the four black squares inside the airtight partial-vacuum bulb to spin. The phenomenon is described by scientists as the “black squares retreating from the light,” a phrase that, recontextualized, recalls Malevich.

Black Squares in Retreat

Ink on Arches watercolor paper
Each approx. 42 x 29.7 cm
2020

The “rule” for these vector drawings is that first a main shape is drawn, which becomes the target for the vectors in the drawing. Then, all the vectors depart from a fixed line (whether straight or curved). When each vector arrives at the boundary of the shape, it bounces off the local tangent at a precise, predetermined billiard angle. Therefore, the angles and overlapping of lines in the drawings are predetermined by the system; once the vector departs its source, the system dictates how it will interact with the shape. The directions of the lines are indicated by small arrows.

This series is an attempt to measure, not landscapes, but landshapes: geometrical shapes as terrain. Sounding Landshapes is related to other projects of mine investigating cartography, and has been developed alongside my conceptual structure of “andscapes.”
 
Landshapes exist in the two-dimensional world of drawing. Landshapes are forms in their own right; drawn lines act on and react to them as phenomena rather than representations. Landshapes acknowledge the drawing artifact itself as terrain, as operational, as landscape where action happens. Landshapes are not just sketches of experiments, but are experiments unto themselves. Landshapes are generative. Landshapes are defiant in their flatness.

(Please note that most of these images are central details of the drawings, around which there is a lot of white space.)

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Elizabeth McTernan