eX de Medici: Beautiful Wickedness

51 50 EX DE MEDICI: BEAUTIFUL WICKEDNESS Godscience VI (detail) 1994 In 1985, the controversial Christian crusader and politician Reverend Fred Nile thundered at students at the Australian National University that ‘Jesus had never referred to homosexuality because the subject was “so filthy and dirty”’, and that ‘male homosexuals were responsible for the “gay plague” of AIDS, in spite of the attempts of “militant homosexuals” to argue that the responsibility was shared with other groups’. 1 Though eX de Medici had by then ceased studying at the Canberra School of Art (CSA), word of Nile’s homophobic rantings soon spread through art circles in Canberra. Although the United States’ main health body, the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), in Atlanta, had declared in September 1983 that ‘AIDS is not known to be transmitted through food, water, air, or environmental surfaces’, and that ‘The great majority of persons in population groups with increased incidences of AIDS have not been affected by the disease’, this did little to dispel the misinformation, prejudice and fear surrounding HIV/AIDS and those communities initially hit hardest by it. 2 To counter such public fear and paranoia and support those affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, a group of gay men in Canberra formed the ACT AIDS Committee in 1983. eX had become involved with the local gay community through a fellow CSA student, Tony Ayres, with whom, in 1983, she joined the Bitumen River Gallery Collective, where, by 1985, Ayres was exhibiting gay-themed works of ‘frank and disarming honesty’. 3 She would also become closely connected to the capital’s community of lesbian and queer women, who, while not as vilified as gay men, were equally marginalised. Although it has been argued that ‘Prior to her move to tattooing eX’s practice was driven by speed, ease and an anti-skill attitude’, this is not strictly true. 4 While she did stage performances on the Cahill Expressway in Sydney and at a Canberra rubbish tip in the mid 1980s, she also produced highly crafted charcoal drawings and gouaches at this time, such as the monumental nudes she drew in situ at her ‘Work Saints’ exhibition at Bitumen River Gallery in 1986. 5 The previous year, the ACT AIDS Committee was reformed as the AIDS Action Council of the ACT, whose president Dr Peter Rowland, who was eX's friend and physician, had run a queer-friendly medical practice in Civic (Canberra’s CBD) for many years. Enticed by a tattoo that her then-partner, Terri Henry, sported, it was while on a film shoot with Tony Ayres in Melbourne in 1988 that eX asked a supposedly reputable tattooist to ink her skin with an image she had designed herself. The result was a drunkenly lumpen misinterpretation of her drawing, confirming for her that ‘Most tattooists in Australia can’t draw and are relegated to the tattooists’ pattern sheets’, while she was correct in her assertion: ‘I can draw’. 6 Despite this initial setback, eX’s adrenaline was now pumped to an extent matched only by the opprobrium of art colleagues who were horrified by her interest in a medium that carried a stigma of association with toxic male outsiders, thugs and criminals. The more that people advised her to avoid Tattoo techniques are very difficult, as an artist it was almost like learning everything all over again. One of the hardest problems in tattooing is making the tattoo stay inside the body and for it to end up looking how you wanted it to. eX de Medici