Cutting an Object into Slices: Master Rock by Maria Fusco
4th May 2016 7:00pm-9:00pm
Creative Critical Writing Lecture
In association with Artangel and Book Works, we are happy to co-host the London launch of Master Rock by Maria Fusco as part of Cutting an Object into Slices: A Series of Lectures on Creative Critical Writing, run by the Practice-based PhD Programme at Royal Holloway.
Date/Time: Wednesday, 4th May, 7.00-9.00pm
Venue: The Swedenborg Society, 20-21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH
(Please note change of time and location from other events in the series.)
The event is ticketed, but bookings through Royal Holloway are free.
+ Click here for free booking.
The London Launch of Master Rock
Maria Fusco in conversation with Joanna Walsh
Master Rock tells the story of the construction of Cruachan Power Station, a state of the art hydroelectric power station deep within Ben Cruachan, one of the highest peaks in Western Scotland. Fusing the documentary and the lyric, three distinct voices bring this story together, through the words and imagined projections of John Mulholland, one of the few surviving explosives experts – known as tunnel tigers – who blasted their way through the granite rock to create an immense chamber for the power station; Elizabeth Falconer, the amateur artist who made a vast mythological, marquetry mural inside the turbine hall; and the voice of the ancient granite itself.
Sampling from the script, Master Rock works through the cavernous space in Ben Cruachan and the history of the construction, presenting the three fictionalised voices in dialogue with extensive archival images. Exploring a range of issues including the importance of site, the space of radio, and writing for voices, Fusco and Walsh’s conversation will be interspersed with short excerpts featuring the different voices in Master Rock.
MARIA FUSCO is a Belfast-born writer now based in Glasgow. She works across an interdisciplinary field of writing including fiction, criticism and theory, and her work has been translated into ten languages. Recent solo-authored books include With A Bao A Qu: Reading When Attitudes Become Form (Los Angeles/Vancouver: New Documents, 2013), GONDA (Berlin/New York: Sternberg Press, 2012), and The Mechanical Copula (Berlin/New York: Sternberg Press, 2011). She is the founder/editor of The Happy Hypocrite, a journal for and about experimental writing and was Director of Art Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. She was the inaugural Writer-in-Residence at Whitechapel Gallery, is a Hawthornden Fellow, was awarded as a Jerwood Creative Catalyst and named as one of Canongate’s Future 40. She is currently a Reader at the University of Edinburgh. Fusco was selected as part of the 2014 Open Call for proposals from Artangel and BBC Radio 4.
JOANNA WALSH’S memoir Hotel was published by Bloomsbury in 2015. Vertigo was published by And Other Stories in March 2016, and her first short story collection, Fractals, was published in 2013. Her writing has been anthologised in Dalkey's Best European Fiction 2015, Salt's Best British Short Stories 2014 and 2015 and elsewhere, and has appeared in Granta Magazine, The Stinging Fly, Gorse, and many other journals. She reviews for the Guardian, the New Statesman and the National, edits at 3:AM Magazine and Catapult, and created and runs the Twitter hashtag #readwomen, heralded by The New York Times as ‘a rallying cry for equal treatment for women writers’.