Sprung Bolt, Decommissioned Vault

This is the bolt mechanism from a 1920s bank vault door, pulled from a safe-maker's workshop in Clerkenwell before the building was gutted. I laid it on a sheet of raw steel and let the afternoon come in low from a single north-facing window — the kind of light that has no interest in flattering anything. Every burr, every groove worn smooth by decades of cycling open and shut, every ghost of oil that seeped into the metal and never fully left: it's all there. A thing that once held the line between kept and taken, now just weight and rust and honesty.