Jamie Shovlin
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MA Fine Art Painting, The Royal College of Art, London |
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The Naomi Jelish project presents assorted documents spanning a year in the early 1990s that are attributed to the fictional teenager of the project’s title. These ‘recovered’ documents, school sketchbooks, ‘extraneous’ drawings and a private sketchbook, are displayed using a variety of museum related devices that seek to memorialise Naomi’s life (she and her family mysteriously disappeared in 1991). An additional character, the retired schoolteacher/curator John Ivesmail, oversees this ‘memorialisation’ (both Naomi Jelish and John Ivesmail are anagrammatic pseudonyms). Ivesmail’s interventions attempt to illuminate Naomi’s troubles by employing her recovered artwork to illustrate Naomi’s grief following the death of her father. Central to the production of the work is the idea of fabrication and reconstruction. Works are generally constructed from scratch and by hand. The purpose is to give the impression of an authentic material or recovered object, only to have the impression subverted upon realisation of the work’s intricate construction. For the Naomi Jelish project, I executed all elements of the project including the actual drawings, the aging of the paper, the presentation of the documents, peripheral materials such as the Ivesmail letters and the newspapers, and the text describing the recovered documents. I have attached several images that relate to the project in an attempt to clarify some of these elements. I envisage that the sum of the project will be several variations on the ‘final’ exhibition of Naomi Jelish’s work and John Ivesmail’s endeavours. These variations may take the form of actual or virtual exhibitions in a variety of specifically chosen venues. I also intend to produce a book that would frame each fiction within the project providing an oversight of the entire project. Awards: Publications: Exhibitions: 2002 2001 |
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The Naomi Jelish Project: