detail of Extraneous Drawing #47
This drama of fragmented traces and benign recollections is echoed in the most compelling pages of the fourth School Sketchbook. Balancing the torn page of a Goya monograph against her own partial realisation of a shirted figure (her father - who else?), the equation only bears fruit on translation of the Spaniard's original title 'Habrazo Paternal' - Paternal Embrace. I doubt the youngster, whose travels had taken her no further than the North of Regent's Park and the South of Camber Sands, had any passing knowledge of Spanish (it was German for her at school), though the old man's embrace of his eager daughter is candidly literal to avoid the necessity of literal translation. The youngster's naked wound is brought into ever-sharper focus with each fragment registered in the Extraneous Drawings - the points at which her father's affection would be most apparent - sighing as one; a vain attempt to summon the apparition of the paternal corpus.
Naomi's frustration at her inability at finding an appropriate coffer for her heartbreak finds its perfect summation in Extraneous Drawing forty-seven (ED.47). Flinging a reprise of an image of an incarcerated ape captured at London Zoo against the 'letter-home' from Demaio, Naomi achieves an inordinate conflation of subject matter and sentiment. It should also be noted that Naomi's mother, Vanessa, referred to her lovely daughter as a 'monkey'. The image also triggered a chain of both Extraneous Drawings and the early majority of School Sketchbook five devoted to an empathetic fascination with the harassed beasts of this domestic order.
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