Frost Line

The fifth plate was always going to combine the two subjects the room had kept separate until now. Late in the season a dusting of snow settles unevenly along the upper third of the ridge above the harbor, following the contour of the rock rather than covering it, and for a few nights the boundary between bare stone and thin snow catches the moon at almost the same angle the first plate's water did a year earlier.

Sixty-one minutes was the longest sitting the room has needed, because the light here had to do two jobs at once: rim the stone the way it did in White Stone, and carry enough of a glow into the snow band to read as distinct from the rock beneath it without ever becoming its own separate source. The result is a single raking line across the frame, brighter where it crosses snow, thinner and cooler where it only touches stone.

This plate carries the fullest crescent in the room so far, close to but never quite a full moon — waxing gibbous at its widest point in this collection. It felt right that the plate joining the two earlier subjects should also be the one where the light itself is nearly whole. Nothing after this has been decided yet; the next plate will be hung whenever a night gives the room a reason to.