Flame and Shadow
Extraneous Drawing # 01
It is appropriate, if not fateful, that the introduction to Miss Naomi V. Jelish's work we are offered is the first of the Extraneous Drawings (ED.01). Both entrance and exit (the same image will be regurgitated in the midst of the Private Sketchbook), end and beginning of a cycle; the image serves as a mirror to our own experience; David Jelish enters the MRI scanner; us, the interior world of Naomi Jelish, both viewer and viewed yet uncertain as to their mutual tragic outcome. This image certainly predates any of the pages in the initial School Sketchbook, the opening page of which is marked by the artist as July the 23rd. David sports a beard - something that was abridged to a moustache in early August 1990. I convinced that it would have been around this time that, unbeknown to Naomi and the rest of the Jelish family, baby Stuart would have been conceived. That we, as spectator, are witness to history (that remains blind to the Jelishs) in the making is virtually parodied by the diagram's realisation on the verso of a sheet culled from an old history schoolbook entitled 'Clues from the past'. A more apposite beginning could not have been manufactured.
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