Art turns to perception and trickery with Naomi V Jelish 2004 by Jamie Shovlin.
A room was filled with newspaper cuttings about Naomi and her family, unbelievably realistic drawings of babies and children created by Naomi the 13 year old girl, diary entries as well as photographs school reports and personal mementoes, to explain the story of the artistic genius Naomi.
As I looked round the room, due to the sheer immense amount of data, the story becomes more and more believable; this draws on a concept that if you’re told something enough you generally begin to believe it. When I saw it I was just simply amazed by the quality of drawing that Naomi produced.
Throughout the work a story is also revealed about the 13 year olds life, 'Naomi showed great aptitude for art in the face of complete indifference from her family and school. But in 1991, a few months after her father drowned, Naomi, then 13, her mother, and her four siblings mysteriously walked out of the family home in Gravesend, Kent, and despite extensive police inquiries, none of them has been seen or heard of again. A cutting from the Kent Messenger discloses that in September 1990 Naomi won "the prestigious North Kent Student Art Prize".
In August the following year the paper reported that police were concerned because the family had vanished. Neighbours said the family seemed "cursed". David Jelish, the head of the family and a road mender with Kent county council, had drowned while saving one of the children, another child had recently survived electrocution and Vanessa, the children's mother, was suffering from a stress-related illness following the death of her youngest son in 1989.
A book accompanying the display at the Saatchi Gallery goes on to say that Naomi's precocious drawings were recovered from the abandoned house some time later by the late John Ivesmail, a science teacher at Naomi's school who had befriended the family. Though beguiled by her sketches, he waited until 1999 to show them in a small exhibition in Gravesend.
Soon after, he passed Naomi's pictures to a friend, a young artist called Jamie Shovlin, who created an exhibition of the drawings, along with all Jelish memorabilia recovered from their house and the newspaper cuttings. ' http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/jamie_shovlin.htm
As the work is placed in a gallery you can believe that the work has been put there as a tribute to Naomi, you don’t doubt the authenticity due to the prestigious environment. This makes me question to what extent do people’s perceptions change when they view something, depending on where it is placed. As you have probably guessed this moving story is simply a hoax. The names Naomi V Jelish and John Ivesmail are actually anagrams of Jamie Shovlin. He claimed he wanted "to test the boundaries of ambiguity". You can question the truth in comparison to fiction, a concept I quite like. The story he chose, is slightly depressing, makes the whole thing more believable, as people don’t generally joke about a little girl’s misfortunes.
'His painstakingly researched and executed works combine inherently flawed systems, pseudo-scientific exactitude and doubtful philosophical propositions with the seemingly objective experience of the archive. Shovlin’s work questions the way in which we map and classify the world around us in order to understand it.' http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/artnow/jamieshovlin/default.shtm
