Title - Deconstructing a Mountain
The human relationship with landscape is often singularly framed around what we can see. Yet, the true life of a place exists in its layered history compressed into stone over hundreds of millions of years, and the brief, intense bursts of human activity which fragment it.
This publication, which accompanies the exhibition Deconstructing a Mountain at the Royal Hibernian Academy’s Ashford Gallery (September 11th-November 8th, 2026), represents the culmination of a four-year photographic study. It stands not as a definitive archive, but as an ongoing meditation on a landscape in constant transformation. At its core, the project examines the tension between geological time and the intervention of human industry, captured at a remote Atlantic quarry.
Quarrying and photography are, in many ways, parallel actions. Both rely on selection, extraction, and revelation. Through these pages, the physical marks of this extraction are laid bare. Yet, the transformation of this mountain is fundamentally a human story. This work turns its focus toward the quarry workers who carry out this demanding labour. Many have traveled across the continent from Lithuania, mapping their own lives onto this remote Irish landscape. Their presence binds this specific Atlantic site to the broader continental narratives of migration.
By deconstructing the mountain, we find that the landscape is never static. It is a living entity, continually made and remade by time and human hands. This publication serves as an extension of the encounters shared within the gallery walls — an invitation to look past the surface of the stone and consider the deep histories embedded within the ground beneath us.
