eX de Medici: Beautiful Wickedness

13 12 EX DE MEDICI: BEAUTIFUL WICKEDNESS De Medici first studied at the Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education, Toowoomba (1980–81), before embarking on a fine art degree in Canberra in 1982, focusing on painting, performance, installation and photography. ‘Beautiful Wickedness’ follows her unorthodox road from an early activist and maker of ephemeral works, discussed perceptively by Dr Jenny McFarlane, through to the late 1980s, when she fearlessly plunged into the hypermasculine world of tattooing. De Medici was apprenticed to Kari Barba in California and spent a decade working professionally as a tattooist. As Dr Ted Gott poetically and movingly relates, de Medici documented this journey through her photographic practice and the blood swabs she collected from her clients, post-tattoo. This underscored the significance of her commitment to the craft at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, when needles and blood were burdened with further unsettling implications. As Gott also highlights in this volume, ‘It was through tattooing that eX developed a fresh and deep appreciation for the premise of skill in art, something not emphasised during her art school training at the modernist-led Canberra School of Art’. In some ways, the well-honed dexterity required to manipulate a tattoo needle could be said to have its artistic and scientific origins in illuminated medieval manuscripts inscribed on vellum, beginning in the twelfth century, and botanical watercolours on paper in the fifteenth. In her introductory essay, exhibition curator Samantha Littley deftly charts how de Medici intentionally shifted her practice to the latter medium. Where her move into tattooing had quite literally baffled the art world, her embrace of the genteel practice of watercolour seemed like an equally puzzling overcorrection. The turning point occurred on 2 March 1996, when de Medici’s Blood of 144 Others 1991–95 was included in the 'Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art', which opened the same day that John Howard’s Liberal coalition government was elected to power. Determined to push back against what she saw as the rising tide of neoliberal conservatism, and in deference to the nineteenth-century botanical illustrator Ferdinand Bauer, whose work paralleled colonial expansion in the Pacific, de Medici made watercolour an integral part of a strategy to lower her viewers’ defences. As Dr Andrea Bubenik eloquently establishes, de Medici’s first forays into natural history illustration were informed by her interest in the seventeenth-century Dutch painting tradition of the vanitas and memento mori. These elaborately constructed still lifes were pressed to the edges with symbolism— skulls, musical instruments, game, food and wine — portentous reminders of the fugitive passage of life and its worldly pleasures. At the same time, de Medici’s residencies at the CSIRO’s Australian National Insect Collection (ANIC) furthered her interest in natural history. At ANIC, she departed from Bauer’s dedicated perfectionism (in her selection of specimens, if not her technical approach), seeking out broken-winged moths with verdigris growing from their pinhole stigmata. Tattooing had prepared her well for the task of reproducing these tiny and impossibly fragile insects in watercolour, another unforgiving medium. De Medici quickly customised the insects’ distinctive scaled livery into new forms — arrowheads signifying colonial rule and, later, more complex weapons of violence and power. In her meticulously accomplished and often large-scale watercolours, de Medici’s aim is to challenge what Jenny McFarlane has described as her viewers' ‘self-protective apathy’, priming them to comprehend the layers of meaning inscribed within her works’ exquisite details. 2 This creates a hybrid of the vanitas and botanical illustration, which melds together the signifiers of nature and culture, producing something that fundamentally corrupts their symbiosis in the process. De Medici’s watercolours reach their zenith in her sprawling, visually saturated panoramas, from the fragile cobalt regalia in Blue (Bower/Bauer) 1998–2000 to the car-borne apocalypse of The Wreckers 2018–19. Overwhelming at first, these works continue to seethe with an optically unnerving baroque energy that gradually loosens our resistance to their embedded messages. There is an artful but airless decadence about both works that immediately invites close looking, which as quickly compounds their meaning. By contrast, the quiet, pared-back austerity of de Medici’s more recent watercolours that crossbreed moths with weapons, such as Depleted Uranium 2021, which continue her denouncement of the technology of war and its ultimate futility, are easier to decode, but no less disturbing. In realising this landmark solo exhibition, I wish to thank the Gallery’s Curator of Australian Art, Samantha Littley for her deeply astute engagement with de Medici’s complex and discerning practice. We are delighted and fortunate to be able to gather new writing from Dr Ted Gott, Senior Curator, International Art, National Gallery of Victoria; Dr Andrea Bubenik, Senior Lecturer in Art History, The University of Queensland; and Dr Jenny McFarlane, Curator of Arts in Health, Canberra Health Services and curator of the major survey ‘Cold Blooded: eX de Medici’ (Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra, 2013). Importantly, we also include reflections from eX de Medici and her long-time collaborator, Dr Marianne Horak, renowned entomologist and Honorary Fellow at the Australian National Insect Collection (ANIC), on their relationship of more than two decades. Together, the texts build a comprehensive picture of the artist’s practice, while casting new light on an extraordinarily diverse but cohesive career. eX de Medici is recognised in public and private collections across the country. Sincere thanks to our institutional lenders, the National Gallery of Australia, acknowledged as a significant lender; Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), Hobart, which has provided welcome material support; alongside the National Portrait Gallery, National Library of Australia, Australian War Memorial, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Shepparton Art Museum, HOTA Gallery, The University of Queensland, Powerhouse Collection, Artbank, Wollongong Art Gallery and Penrith Regional Gallery, Home of the Lewers Bequest. Works have also been generously loaned by some of the many passionate private collectors who treasure de Medici’s works, and we thank them all. We are grateful to be joined by a dedicated group of sponsors, comprising Major Partners, Shayher Group and Urban Art Projects; Tourism and Media Partners, Brisbane Economic Development Agency, JCDecaux and Southern Cross Austereo through B105; and Supporting Partner, Bacchus Wine Merchant. ‘Beautiful Wickedness’ has been made possible with funding for major exhibitions from the Queensland Government. We thank Premier of Queensland Annastacia Palaszczuk MP, Minister for the Olympic and Paralympic Games; Hon. Leeanne Enoch MP, Minister for Housing and Communities, Minister for Digital Economy, and Minister for the Arts; and Arts Queensland for their commitment to our program. This publication has been generously supported by the Gordon Darling Foundation. Finally, I would like to thank Exhibition Patrons The Ardour Collection, Beaver Galleries – Martin and Susie Beaver, Dr Patricia Jungfer and Mr Robert Postema, Justine and Damian Roche, and Sullivan+Strumpf, and donors, for their generous support. Most importantly, our heartfelt thanks to eX de Medici for creating this incisive and important body of work. As former QAGOMA Director Dr Doug Hall AM has written: ‘her art is hugely intelligent, beautifully and skilfully executed and underpinned with an unnerving tension’. 3 We are privileged to be able to celebrate it. Endnotes 1 eX de Medici, ‘NVAEC 2016: Plenary session 1 – eX de Medici’ [20 January 2016], National Visual Arts Education Conference (NVAEC), National Gallery of Australia , 15 June 2016, <nga.gov.au/on-demand/nvaec-2016-plenarysession-1-ex-de-medici/> , viewed September 2022. 2 Jenny McFarlane, ‘Relaxed and comfortable’, in Cold Blooded: eX de Medici [exhibition catalogue], Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University, Canberra, 2013, p.28. 3 Doug Hall, ‘Iron fist in a velvet glove’, in McFarlane, p.17.