John Ivesmail's Essay

Again one points to the ocular conflation of label and eye - the artist self-aware on completion of the iris. From Extraneous Drawings twenty-four to thirty-one (ED.24-31) Naomi's pencil grows ever more unsure in tracing the outline of her father's body and, metaphorically, his existence. These depictions, completed over three days in mid September, are as efficient a translation of emotional vexation to pictorial form as anything revealed throughout Naomi's anguishing outpourings. The only respite to the gathering clouds of doubt is proposed in the thirty-first Extraneous Drawing (ED.31), in which a nurse casually re-sets David Jelish's bed. Of course this image is fraught with hesitation: has her father been granted leave of his hospital confines or has his conditioned worsened? One can only imagine how the young artisan's stomach knotted on sight of the panorama she lovingly captured.

Alas the vista was non-consequential in respect of both outcomes - her father neither recovered nor was released. The recapitulation to the floral depictions after the edgy passage of the previous images bespeaks a welcome air of relief. Despite the air's tint with the nascent aroma of hope, Naomi's father's condition again sidles into to the enclosure of consideration although on this occasion the flowers do not deflect but reflect the murky rays of kismet emanating from the patrial sickbed. With its lethargic motion to the bottom left of the page, the tulip of Extraneous Drawing thirty-nine (ED.39) underlines the extent to which the floral drawings have been misshapen under the presage of David Jelish's providence. The consequent image (ED.40) aches to reaffirm the buoyant function the flowers originally performed. Standing alone as the only Extraneous Drawing realised in colour, the small azalea wavers in the wind of fate, the image powerless to continue as resistance to the crush of destiny that awaits David Jelish.