The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes
UNDOUBTABLY the discovery of this collection undermines many of John Ivesmail’s conclusions and certainly his curatorial methodology. Essentially, Ivesmail could approach the whole notion of a Jelish archive as a blank canvas, as few people had witnessed the fruits of Naomi’s labour and certainly no one had provided any previous information on the artist’s activities. The book was Ivesmail’s to write. And write it he did.
Whilst Ivesmail’s account is unquestionably in-depth and a fascinating read, this recent discovery now provides the opportunity to re-assess some of his denouements. This is initially signalled by the imagery prevalent in the first two drawings from the ‘Nash’ collection [3 & 4]. These images are facsimiles of two Extraneous Drawings (ED.02 and ED.27) and appear to have been removed from Naomi’s first School Sketchbook. The images’ origin in the sketchbook queries Ivesmail’s assumptions that none of Naomi’s depictions of her father’s hospitalisation are “stained” with a signature (both of these are) and that none spread into the pages of the School Sketchbooks. Thus Ivesmail’s delineation of School Sketchbook as “sanctioned” space opposed to the “clandestine” arena of the Extraneous Drawings is called into question.
That Ivesmail performed this amputation of sketchbook pages is without question. Both leaves carry the holding stamp of the Kent County Council Archive department, the site of many of Ivesmail’s epiphanies regarding the young artist’s work. One can delineate a primary method of Ivesmail’s streamlining of the Jelish body of work into one that suited his own desires a little more than the one initially offered to him.