In 1991, the thirteen-year-old Naomi V. Jelish and her family mysteriously vanished from their home in Kent, never to be seen again. Shortly after their disappearance, John Ivesmail, the retired science teacher at Naomi’s former school, discovered a clutch of her sketchbooks. Inside, he found the drawings of a talented but perhaps disturbed young girl. The enigmatic and macabre drawings seem to express Naomi's grief following her father’s tragic death. They illustrate scenes copied from St John Ambulance and other medical pamphlets, depicting newborn babies, bandaged arms, and patients having CAT scans.

In the year following Naomi’s disappearance, Ivesmail tried to trace her through an investigation of her drawings. He searched the family’s house and spearheaded campaigns in the local press in the hope of unravelling the events that led up to the disappearance. He decided to collect all of Naomi's drawings for an exhibition, but died in 2002 before it could take place. Prior to his death, however, Ivesmail passed on instructions to Jamie Shovlin about how to obtain and show the girl's work.

Confronted with these images and diary entries, we inevitably try to piece together the fragments of an elaborate plot, looking for clues in Naomi's artwork. The story of Naomi V. Jelish and John Ivesmail is resolved, but also further complicated, when we realise their names are anagrams of Jamie Shovlin. The artist evokes the existence of these characters and their interconnecting biographies with carefully fabricated hand-made documents. His cast of characters inhabit a coherent world made up of selected period cultural references, from faded newsprint to the stickers on Naomi’s sketchbooks.

Jamie Shovlin (born 1978 in England) lives and works in London.