This drawing perhaps discloses certain prejudices in Ivesmail’s ‘management’ of the Jelish archive more acutely than any other in the new anthology. That Ivesmail viewed this sheet is beyond doubt. In his essay, Ivesmail quotes directly from this previously absent sheet, reporting Naomi’s reaction on receipt of a letter addressed to her father as “like being stabed (sic) every time” it happened. This extract is only visible on the sheet pulled from the schoolbook. Indeed, the envelope continues the artist’s outpouring begun on the pages that Ivesmail chose to represent Naomi’s seventh School Sketchbook, itself executed on an old utility bill addressed to David Jelish.
Alongside Ivesmail’s thorough re-write of the relationship between student and teacher are series of images that are entirely absent from the central collection. The most obvious of these is the string of four leaves Naomi devoted to fellow student, Robert Christopher. The first of these [8] suggests that the boy is not only an excuse for the young student to show off her portrait skills but more likely an object of Naomi’s romantic affection. The execution of these drawings stretch over many months and through several of Naomi’s outlets, the most compelling of which is the sheet pulled from the third School Sketchbook [15]. As with all the sheets of that document, the page is tarred with graphite. One can imagine this leaf puncturing the mass of frottages that dominate that book’s later pages, puncturing Ivesmail’s notion that both “formerly divergent reservoirs” – School Sketchbook and Extraneous Drawings- “had now subsumed into a single lake” in the mass of rubbings.