Cold Tryworks is a photographic archive of places from which human presence has withdrawn.
Works of human ingenuity, expressions of function and intent. But when that function ceases, traces of it remain for a while, as water, vegetation, oxidation and gravity slowly begin to rewrite the space.
Tryworks are the furnaces built aboard whaling ships to render blubber into oil. Like those described by Melville in Chapter 96 of Moby-Dick: almost alive and pulsing. Cold Tryworks imagines what remains afterwards. When the fire has gone out and the blackened fat has congealed. When everything is cold.
The sites are identified only by a number. Names and locations are deliberately omitted. What remain are the images, the material traces and, whenever it can be reconstructed, the history of what those places once were.