A more fleshed out, macro-perspective-sort-of-review will appear as a micro-review in the upcoming fall issue of the Boston Review.

It’s a slippery slope, and in _a_, I’m not quite sure one can state, trump idea/abstract concept (“death as concept”) over personal experience (I think this is what you’re ultimately stating in your reply).

This is an interesting take on my relationship to Woodman’s work in the book. It might, however, be slightly misleading. Whilst the epigraph is my only direct textual reference to Woodman, the entire project is saturated with her influence. The three-part structure of the text (interior/geometries/disorder) is based on Woodman’s book “some disordered interior geometries” (Synapse Press, 1981). In the book, Woodman collages her photographs with found materials (chiefly her own notebooks and school textbooks), producing a form of sequence which holds a tension between the perfect shapes of geometry and the ‘disordered’ geometries domestic existence and of the female body. By layering these geometries over the mathematical diagrams, a personal physics unfolds which seems, to me, to indicate the fragility bodies and objects. This was a huge influence on the book as a whole, and the format of the third section, ‘disorder’, is based around these concepts.

It’s also worth noting that several of Woodman’s images appear in the third section of the text, collaged with found materials and with my own writing. The text of the third section is in part a response to a particular Woodman image, which also appears on the final page of the text. All of the visual material in the text is my own, not Ken Ehrlich’s, though I’m flattered that my work might be mistaken for Ken’s! The main image which appears on the back cover, ‘Lakeside Landscape Narrative’, was designed by Ken Ehrlich and Susan Simpson, which is perhaps where the confusion arose.

It’s generally bad form to respond to a review in this way, so I’m not sure how much I want to say about the book as an elegy or tribute to a friend. I would say, however, that whilst the book is dedicated to Aerin Davidson, I think the text functions more as an exploration of the concepts of death, mourning and loss than an account of my personal experience of those things. My visual and textual responses to Woodman are a part of that. By doing this, I do not mean to draw parallels between Aerin Davidson and Francesca Woodman (athough, considering how much Woodman’s work has been retrospectively interpreted through her suicide, it is unavoidable to some extent). I wanted, rather, to find ways of documenting absence and loss, and Woodman’s work – rather than her biography – was the focus. As Stein was also a major influence on the piece, the Woodman epigraph was included as a link between the two, and also an indicator of the movement away from language and ‘solid’ objects, and into a much more ethereal and ‘disordered’ kind of exploration in the final part of the text. I don’t quite know how this one reference to Woodman in the text has been separated from all of the other references in the text, but I guess it’s a lesson in reader interpretation.