Signs, sense, and significance: Texture in Tenby
The lady at the fish stall exudes smiles with a Welsh twang and a sincere joy. The man on the bench is having a great day as he tells us he’s awaiting a friend he hasn’t seen for a while.
I’m in southwest Wales listening to a Scottish accordionist playing a contemporary Russian tune on an old Italian accordion. Earlier, as I looked out over Carmarthen Bay, I listened to an Irish singer from thirty years ago singing… “All my life I’ve watched the sky and sea change colour…”
As you may know, I’m a contemplative. It’s not a helpful trait. I’ve been aware of the ‘paralysis of analysis’ since I started de- & re-constructing things in the 1990s. But it’s what I do. I can’t help noticing stuff.
A bit like a magpie or bowerbird, I’m one of those people who have shelves of small trinkets or curiosities collected along the way: a pebble with a pattern from Polruan, a plastic toy character from 1982, a coin from Ecuador, a conker, a badge, a silver something…
The things I register, inscribe, capture, are just that, emblems of moments. The photos I take are frozen fragments of moments.
However, what often strikes me is that the things I capture lack life or spirit. Taken out of context, they lack the breath, the respiration, of people. The viewer might imbue an image with meaning, but that’s from the reader’s perspective. A year before I was born, Roland Barth declared the ‘birth of the viewer’, ah, polyphonic play! Jacques Derrida suggested everything is textured. ‘Il n’y a pas de hors-texte.’ There is nothing outside the text, every thing, object, or event is caught up in an endless fabric of texture.
Images may whisper things and hint at a notion or feeling, but the humanity of the fish lady and the excitement of the man on the bench, that’s something you can’t capture or collect without human presence. Perhaps that’s what I am searching for, human presence.
William Blake poetically wrote, ‘Joy and woe are woven fine, a clothing for the soul divine’
The fabric of life might be made up of warp and weft; smooth and rough textures, bindings and frayings. The textures from Tenby might be just that, ‘textures’. But the fish lady’s smile and the man’s excitement are so much more alive!
Textures from Tenby:
