School Sketchbook six is regrettably a casualty of bad preservation; both cover and content have been wounded by access to damp and many pages are badly defaced by abrasive contact with adjacent leaves. Regardless of the ill retention, all original pages are present with the opening leaf marked by the artist as the 10th of January 1991 and the concluding as the 18th of February.
The bindings of the sixth document trace Naomi's passage from girlhood to adolescence. Pilfering pages and decorations from her elder sister's fashion and lifestyle magazines, the youngster's attention turns to how to embellish not only the sheathe of her Schoolbook but also her own visage.
The sixth book instigates a new project: 'Personal Identity' - an assignment that requested the solitary pupil divulged something of herself. Hence the Schoolbook forms a composite portrait of both Naomi and the various members of the Jelish clan. This introduction to kith and kin is extended into the Extraneous Drawings (ED.62-69) with many of the pages of the sixth document acting as preliminary to the realisations in the larger works. Many depictions are sourced from earlier Schoolbooks and Extraneous Drawings; what was once too painful to speak of confidentially now aired to public forum.
Towards the end of the sixth sketchbook, a single page is fixed with a reprise of the frottage technique so abundant towards the end of Schoolbook three (SSB.3), although on this occasion the technique is applied to a sheet pulled taut across Naomi's father's grave. Due to appalling storage conditions, only a fifth of the original rubbing resides in the pages of the sixth book. Fortunately for the recent viewer, the artist replicated the procedure over a more consequential expanse for Extraneous Drawing #70. Complementary to the paternal grave frottage is a smaller, additionally delicate rendering of her younger brother Peter's sepulchre (ED.71). Here the fusion of images and techniques initially anticipated in both early Schoolbooks 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 #55 & 57; the union of technique applied to, respectively, the tree bark found in the horse's meadow (SSB.2) and the interior walls of the Jelish home (SSB.3) and, finally, to the dyad of graves, enclosing father and son (ED.70-71).