I’ve been thinking about the narrative implicit in texture—texture as a form of storytelling.
From the bark of a tree or the cracks of a sidewalk or the side of a building exterior, we can glean information about what has happened to that tree or that sidewalk or that building.
Just like the skin of the human body telling a story—our wrinkles and our spots and imperfections and scars—all physical objects in the world bear those kinds of marks, clues to what has come before.
Imagine a fence.
When it’s new, there’s a lot of consistency in the materials and the construction, assuming someone’s done a decent job. It looks consistent and regular and standard.
If you come back in 10 years or 20 years to look at that same fence, what are you going to find? Discoloration, marks, maybe graffiti. Some missing, fallen, decayed, rotting, partially removed boards, some gaps in the fence, maybe some of the nails or screws have come out, maybe whole sections have collapsed. Maybe plants have grown over parts of it.
You’re going to see traces of the past. Traces of narrative.
Photo by Betty Brown
That visual connection is so automatic and intuitive—to look at something that is used, that is worn, immediately our brain starts filling in the possibilities of what happened. It’s so seamless, it’s almost as if it’s written on the object. And in some ways it is.
But it’s in a language that’s physical, material, visual, even sensory—and it’s transportive. The old worn fence is like a time machine. Suddenly as if in a dream state you’re flying back in time, getting glimpses of children playing, people hanging out next to it, the dog scratching at it, little plants getting seeded in the ground and then getting larger.
There’s something about the not-knowing that is, I think, better—that idea of a mystery just out of reach. We can sense the shape of what the answer might be, but there’s no way to really know the answer.
xx