John Ivesmail's Essay

Of course of all the above-cited aspirations were initially secondary to my desire to yield to a greater public the remarkable artistic skills of the young Miss Jelish (A skill so precocious that the County Council decided to retain their ragged collection of the youngsters' output). From my initial encounter with the young artist I have yearned to share her prodigious creations with others. Hopefully this desire will be sated upon the opening of the exhibition at the Towncentric I have co-organised with the keepers of the Archives at the County Library.

This essay is intended to provide an overview of both Naomi's work and my own in connecting threads and enabling Naomi's mental wanderings to be appreciated and enjoyed by a larger audience. The text follows a broadly chronological order and hopefully this has enabled me to eliminate any absences in the relationships between individual works. Ideally the essay would be interpreted in close relation to the exhibition although I hope to have included sufficient detail to enable the essay to exist without the exhibition and vice versa.

I have spent almost a decade endeavouring to reveal the incredible talents of Naomi V. Jelish to a public at large. A near-decade spent chasing false leads, searching empty houses and, more recently, delving into dark archives. Hopefully by the time this composition meets the eyes of the reader, the exhibition will be in full bloom and the wider public will cease to be ignorant of the exceptional creation that sprang from their own back yard.