‘Naomi Jelish is a fictional alias used by the artist to produce a collection of 50 drawings that comprise an imaginary sketchpad (...). The pages of the sketchpad are artificially aged, deformed and post dated to 1991, (…) The work employs a highly representational style of drawing, the drawing taken from medical dictionaries (…). Thus the work becomes a document of suffering featuring a persistent focus on ritualistic personal hygiene, hospital bed/tragedy scenes and mother-sibling interactions.’

[LESS]
‘Naomi Jelish is a fictional alias used by the artist to produce a collection of 50 drawings that comprise an imaginary sketchpad (...). The pages of the sketchpad are artificially aged, deformed and post dated to 1991, (…) The work employs a highly representational style of drawing, the drawing taken from medical dictionaries (…). Thus the work becomes a document of suffering featuring a persistent focus on ritualistic personal hygiene, hospital bed/tragedy scenes and mother-sibling interactions.’

‘Fictional alter-egos are a strange species in art; a form of liberation from being responsible for your output, in a profession that can’t help itself when it comes to privileging the individual. Jamie Shovlin’s collection of drawings by the possible real Naomi Jelish effect so many displacing jumps I no longer know where I am. Time, date, location, subject, author, neither a forgery, neither a document. But there’s a desperate melancholy about these images of smiling medical professionals assisting the citizens of an antique welfare sate, because of all this layering going on –of things, time, people- all lost, vaguely retrievable through a few unauthenticated traces: The artist turned inventor of other people’s memories, Tyrrell in Bladerunner, fiction vanishing as each reality is bracketed by another point of view, purporting to be the “real”, from which the story is told, as in Nabokov’s Pale Fire.’

[LESS]
‘Fictional alter-egos are a strange species in art; a form of liberation from being responsible for your output, in a profession that can’t help itself when it comes to privileging the individual. Jamie Shovlin’s collection of drawings by the possible real Naomi Jelish effect so many displacing jumps I no longer know where I am. Time, date, location, subject, author, neither a forgery, neither a document. But there’s a desperate melancholy about these images of smiling medical professionals assisting the citizens of an antique welfare sate, because of all this layering going on –of things, time, people- all lost, vaguely retrievable through a few unauthenticated traces: The artist turned inventor of other people’s memories, Tyrrell in Bladerunner, fiction vanishing as each reality is bracketed by another point of view, purporting to be the “real”, from which the story is told, as in Nabokov’s Pale Fire.’