Image: Fionn McCann, 'Deconstructing a Mountain', Untitled, 2026, archival print, 65 × 56 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.
Fionn McCann will show ‘Deconstructing a Mountain’, a new body of photographic work made over four years, at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin from 11 September to 8 November 2026. The exhibition traces a landscape in continual transformation, focusing on the extraction of rock from a mountain shaped over hundreds of millions of years.
The work sets that geological span against human labour. McCann’s photographs record the layers, cuts and traces left by quarrying and turn attention to the workers who shape the site, many of whom, the RHA says, have travelled from Lithuania. Connecting a remote Atlantic location to wider histories of migration, labour and the movement of skills across Europe, the project treats photography and quarrying as parallel acts of selection and revelation, and presents landscape not as fixed but as continually made and remade.
McCann’s practice examines how landscapes carry traces of time, labour and memory, an approach informed by his background in archaeology. The RHA describes his projects as sustained and research-led, drawn to places where geology, industry and cultural history meet, and less concerned with documenting a landscape than with the relationships between people, material and place. The three works illustrated by the gallery are untitled archival prints from 2026, each 65 × 56 cm.
The show is one of five with which the RHA reopens after a summer closure, at 11am on Friday 11 September: alongside McCann there are Una Sealy RHA’s ‘Time Lines: Selected Works 2016–26’, Maïa Nunes’s ‘Lake Burst’, ‘Cnuasach’, curated by Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh PRHA, and Adrian Duncan’s ‘Buildings from a Novel’.
The RHA is at 15 Ely Place, Dublin 2, and admission is always free. The galleries are closed on Mondays and open Tuesday to Saturday from 11am to 5pm and Sunday from noon to 5pm, with late opening on Wednesday until 7pm. ‘Deconstructing a Mountain’ closes on Sunday 8 November 2026.
