Deconstructing a Mountain by Fionn McCann

Fionn will be signing his book during Polycopies 2026

We tend to frame our relationship with landscape around what we can see. A place also holds a layered history, compressed into stone over hundreds of millions of years and fragmented by brief, intense bursts of human activity.

This publication is the culmination of a four-year photographic study. It is an ongoing meditation on a landscape in constant transformation. At a remote Atlantic quarry, the project looks at the tension between geological time and the intervention of human industry.

Quarrying and photography are parallel actions, and both rely on selection, extraction and revelation. These pages lay bare the physical marks of that extraction. The transformation of this mountain is fundamentally a human story, though, and the work turns its attention to the quarry workers who carry out the demanding labour. Many have travelled across the continent from Lithuania, mapping their own lives onto this remote Irish landscape. Their presence binds the site to wider continental narratives of migration.

The landscape is never static: it is a living entity, continually made and remade by time and human hands. This publication extends the encounters shared within the gallery walls and invites the reader to look past the surface of the stone to the deep histories embedded in the ground beneath us.