eX de Medici: Beautiful Wickedness

57 56 EX DE MEDICI: BEAUTIFUL WICKEDNESS The author's tattoos by eX de Medici: Dagger with Snakes and Rainbow Flag Anger ‘Lesbians’, Kerry Bashford also noted in 1994: . . . are beginning to redefine what is acceptable on female flesh. They are not content with the tired, cliched illustrations that have graced the walls of [tattoo] salons and studios for decades and are helping to revolutionise the art with their interest in modern primitive or tribal designs. 33 From her earliest training with Barba, eX wished to create a new language of tattooing specifically for female clients, eschewing the ‘crappy drawings from some bygone era’ that had traditionally been the only designs on offer to women by male tattooists. 34 eX's drawings like Flaming Heart and Horseshoe , both 1989, from the Barba era seem to be mapping out expansive new possibilities for embellishing the female body with a meaningful dialectic. During her decade of commercial tattoo practice, eX trained four apprentices — all of them women — passing on not just her expertise in the medium, but also her personal work ethic. As one of her apprentices, Megan Oliver, has stated: Tattooing is the most fascinating and challenging medium I've ever worked in. I like the collaborative, personal, sincere nature of tattooing — it avoids the crass marketplace motivation of commercial graphic art and the ego tripping of institutionalised fine art. You get to use your artistic abilities, not just to flaunt them for their own sake or to enable some greed merchant to make a huge pile of money, but to make someone else happy and add a little colour to their journey. Each tattoo is a marker of the passage of time, a meditation on impermanence, a funky hand-made one-off in a world of slick, computerised mass production. 35 In the early to mid 1990s, eX worked closely with Australia’s HIV-positive community, welcoming clients who were carrying the infection into her studio without fear or prejudice. She attended to their need to have their status recognised as people fighting a then-terminal disease, often inscribing upon them symbols of their toxicity, such as ‘HIV+’ or biomedical hazard iconography. She tattooed numerous workers from Dr Peter Rowland’s medical practice during these years, many of whom would not survive to see the long-awaited arrival of life-preserving AIDS drugs at the end of 1995. ‘Because I work with tattooing and blood’, eX lamented in 1996, ‘there’s this idea that what was once our friend is now our enemy. Our blood was good, now it’s evil’. 36 Adopting an approach similar to the safe sex strategy developed by the Gay Men’s Health Crisis group in the United States in the mid 1980s (‘assume that all sexual partners are HIV-positive, and wear a condom accordingly’), eX’s philosophy became to ‘assume [that] everyone has something and practise universal precaution’. 37 In her eyes: . . . the people I work with who have HIV/AIDS, they believe they have a right to do as everybody else does, and that is to engage in something which beautifies them. A lot of people I work with have a desire to be fully complete on their death. And so quite often there is a race to finish them before their time arrives. 38 By treating all who came to be tattooed with the same degree of transmission-preventative hygiene and care, eX made her studio a place that embraced everyone, with no distinction being drawn between clients. During these years, while eX continued to develop intricately detailed independent drawings in tandem with her tattoo practice — such as Untitled (Dice with Stars and Red Roses) and Untitled (Dagger with Snakes and Red Wave) , both 1995 — she came to reflect on how, at the end of a day in the studio: The only physical results remaining . . . after the tattoo are a personal collection of slides and the grungy swabs and patches smeared with ink and blood. The images walk out the door and may never be seen by more than a select few intimates. 39 From 1991 onwards, she collected the kitchen paper towels that she used to absorb the blood exuding from the designs of freshly tattooed clients, sealing the towels in ziplock bags, both to protect them and to prevent the dried discharge from coming into contact with others. Viewing these as tailings from the mine of her tattoo practice, she confessed: The blood swabs are particularly close to my heart . . . Generally body emanations are without form and associated with something repellent. I feel these patches are lyrical with images made by the body. 40 When exhibited en masse at the 1996 Adelaide Biennial as Blood of 144 Others 1991–95, these swabs thrummed in a silent symphony of shed and shared blood that bound the artist with the memories of those she has indelibly inscribed with their personal emblems.