The fourth School Sketchbook commences on the 23rd of October stretching to the early days of December leaving the document as one of the lengthiest of the entire oeuvre in terms of duration. The Schoolbook lies in a reasonable condition – the majority of original leaves remain intact, despite a large water stain spreading outwards from the bottom of the book’s spine. All extra pages attached by the artist and/or teacher, including a dense collection of images photocopied onto graph paper, maintain their original location towards the rear of the document.
Left blank but for a trio of stickers, the bindings of the Schoolbook represents a return to the unspoilt natural – deficient in the previous dyad of document’s bindings. The stickers that decorate the cover derive from the youngster’s trip to London Zoo (offered by the artist’s mother as a respite to the emergent trauma of her father’s passing).
The early leaves of the document are also dominated by the youngster’s zoo visit, the adolescent tragedienne evoking many of the caged beasts, each a reflection of her own mindset. Finally emancipated from the vicious claw of her schoolteacher’s red ink (the trip was taken during the half term holiday), the youngster finds herself free to deviate from what was demanded by the school project. The subsequent flood of twenty-two uninterrupted excavations, each accomplished over the course of a couple of hours spent in the company of the former wilds, sated an urgent craving the esurient artist demanded to find issues of a analogous compass. As with the latter pages of the previous Schoolbook, these early pages are executed in absence of any concurrent Extraneous Drawings.
The most compelling later leaves of the fourth School Sketchbook echo the drama of fragmented traces and benign recollections evident in the resurgent Extraneous Drawings (ED.42-46). Balancing the torn page of a Goya monograph against Naomi’s own partial realisation of a shirted figure (her father - who else?), the equation only bears fruit on translation of the Spaniard’s original title ‘Habrazo Paternal’ – Paternal Embrace. The teenager’s naked grief is brought into ever-sharper focus with each fragment registered in both the later pages of the fourth Schoolbook and the complementary Extraneous Drawings – the points at which her father’s affection would be most apparent – sighing as one; a vain attempt to summon the apparition of the paternal body.