John Ivesmail's Essay

Following the appearance of the image, the third School Sketchbook plays host to multiplicities on the same theme; Naomi's febrile rubbings tracing both the internal parameters of her home and her mind. Of the entire oeuvre, this anthology of dictions is perhaps the most rapaciously accomplished with twenty-six leaves barraged in only a fortnight. This feverish clotting of the walls of the house with paper and graphite throws the previously celebratory drawings of flowers onto a more sinister plain - the floral graphics insurrected as cenotaph to an unforeseen (though hardly surprising?) event.

The execution of the vicious frottages in the third School Sketchbook coincides with a total absence of Extraneous Drawings, as if the two formerly divergent reservoirs had now subsumed into a single lake. When each stream of consciousness is re-diverted into their necessary divides, each vessel again takes on chattels that distinguish the sanctioned and clandestine accounts established previous to fate's patricide.

This redirection after the cataclysm of her father's death is evident in the unadorned nature of School Sketchbook four's bindings (SSB.4). Left blank but for a trio of stickers that will be exegeted later, the bindings represented a return to the unspoilt natural: a retreat to a locale where equivocation is happily absent. The early pages of the document are dominated by the youngster's October the twenty-third visit to London Zoo (A trip I was joyful to be able to provide courtiership for, hence my purchase of the stickers for the youthful artist). I perched in silent awe as Naomi evoked many of the caged beasts, each a reflection of her own mindset. Finally emancipated from the vicious claws of the school (the trip was taken during the half term holiday), the youngster was free to deviate from what was demanded by the school project. This flood of twenty-two uninterrupted excavations, each accomplished over the course of a couple of hours spent in the company of the former wilds, sated an urgent craving the esurient artist demanded to find issues of a analogous compass. I can clearly recall the ameliorative smile gripping the youngsters face as we paced home later that day.