John Ivesmail's Essay

The bindings of the sixth School Sketchbook also record an evolution in Naomi's being, tracing a passage from girlhood to adolescence. Pilfering pages and decorations from her elder sisters' fashion and lifestyle magazines, the youngsters' attention turns to how to embellish not only the sheathe of her schoolbook but also her own visage. One could see this over-exuberant decoration as retaliatory compensation for having to detail the virtue of her grief, though this essayist views the two as complementary agents, each asserting their practitioner against the restitution of the anguish that had suffused her previous months. Still it is with understandable trepidation that the young artist approaches the feelings she carries towards her fathers' untimely exit.

Devoid of sublimatory references and symbolic jaundices Naomi emphasises her own need to confront the unforgiving reality of her father's death. Towards the end of the sixth School Sketchbook, a single page is fixed with a reprise of the graphite frottage technique so abundant towards the end of School Sketchbook three although on this occasion the technique is applied to a sheet pulled taut across her fathers grave. Due to appalling storage conditions on the part of both St. John's School and later the Kent County Council Archives, only a fifth of the original rubbing resides in the pages of the Sketchbook. Fortunately for the recent viewer, the young artist replicated the procedure over a more consequential expanse evident in Extraneous Drawing seventy (ED.70). Complementary to the paternal grave frottage is a smaller, less defined, additionally delicate rendering of her younger brother Peter's sepulchre (ED.71). Here the fusion of images and techniques initially anticipated in both early Sketchbooks and Extraneous Drawings is developed to total fruition; father and child reunited in form as they are in the twin resuscitation vistas of Extraneous Drawings fifty(s)-five and seven; the geographical conflation of meadow, water and final resting place; the union of technique applied to, respectively, the tree bark found in the meadow and around Ehrlich's Pond (SSB.2-28/34), the interior walls of the Jelish residence (SSB.3-13/40) and, finally, to the dyad of graves, enclosing father and son (ED.70-71). The cycle pulls full circle revealing a dense web of reference and echo.