Cork Lagging, Tyne Cold Store No. 3

The pipe wrapping had been peeling for decades before I found it — layers of cork and hessian tape pulling back from the iron like skin from a blister, each edge stained that particular ferrous amber that only comes from years of condensation cycling. I worked the plate in three stages, biting the frost-bloom texture into the aquatint ground first, then collaging a strip of original temperature-drum graph paper into the lower margin where the readings flatten into a long zero. The composition is close — almost uncomfortably close — because the distance between maintenance and abandonment is never very far in these buildings.