“Exploded essays”, the poet, novelist and memoirist Lavinia Greenlaw calls the 17 pieces of almost-art-critical prose in this bright, mournful book. The phrase suggests a bristling diagram or enlarged view, an annotated arc of thought or feeling. But also something violently botched or ruined – don’t all essays worth the name aspire, more or less secretly, to blowing up their own form? In revisiting a lifetime of looking – at art, landscapes, weather, heavenly bodies, human faces and sometimes nothing at all – Greenlaw puts certain stark questions to herself and the things she looks at: “How do we make sense of what we see? How do we describe what we have never seen before?”
Her title comes from John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1689. But the wealth and vagrancy of Greenlaw’s interests seem to connect her to the earlier part of that busy century, and further back into the 16th: the time of the cabinet of curiosities. The “image storm” of early modernity is a recurring theme: there are rapt and keen descriptions of animal studies by Joris Hoefnagel, a perspective model (now in the National Gallery) by Samuel van Hoogstraten, Artemisia Gentileschi’s Lucretia. Infinite riches in a little room: Greenlaw’s Wunderkammer also contains the photography of Francesca Woodman, sculptures by Eva Hesse and Rachel Whiteread, the discovery and lethal manufacture of radium, the naming of clouds by Luke Howard, the lives and works of JM Barrie and Virginia Woolf. Also: the author’s own excursions in the Alps, the Arctic, East Anglia and the dark remembered woods of her youth.
