Master Rock is a repertoire for a mountain.

Rough land, open palm. Bodies are machines that shake. Big boned faces, big hands, big claws, ah Jesus, well-used. Bore. Blast. Smash. Force on loan. Must be hard and clever to survive in this technological age. Granite knows the biological. Gods inside the mountain, just plain men outside.

Working through the cavernous space in Ben Cruachan, the largest peak on the west coast of Scotland, Maria Fusco exhumes three fictional voices from fact: Tunnel tigers, the Irish explosives experts who emptied out the mountain to build a power station; Elizabeth Falconer, the artist who produced a mural inside that only the site’s workers ever see; and Granite, the 450 million year-old rock of Cruachan itself as a main character.

Fusco uses original writing, archival materiality and topographical reportage as her tools to compress geology, mythology and technology: to write the inside of her mountain.

Maria Fusco is a Belfast-born writer and is the founder and editorial director of The Happy Hypocrite. Her work is published internationally and translated into eight languages. She is the author of With A Bao A Qu Reading When Attitudes Become Form (New Documents, 2013), The Mechanical Copula (Sternberg Press, 2010) and wrote the screenplay for GONDA, a film by Ursula Mayer, commissioned by Film London, and published as a ciné-roman (Sternberg, 2012). Fusco has been invited writer-in-residence at Lisbon Architecture Triennale, Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, and Whitechapel Gallery, London, and, has been awarded as a Jerwood Creative Catalyst. She is a Reader at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh and was Director of Art Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Master Rock is a commission by Artangel and BBC Radio 4, with the support of Creative Scotland and co-published by Artangel and Book Works, as part of Co-series, No. 11. Designed by A Practice for Everyday Life, edition of 1,250, 92pp, duotone, with a hard cover, 210 x 135 mm.