eX de Medici: Beautiful Wickedness

77 76 EX DE MEDICI: BEAUTIFUL WICKEDNESS CSIRO/ANIC Study #20 2001 Marianne  eX eX de Medici’s wickedness — beguiling us with beauty, only to make us face the evils of our destructive habits — tallies so much with my own pleasures and frustrations as a biologist in today’s world. Nature is endlessly beautiful, and, for eX and me, this is symbolised in the delicate patterns and colours of our little moths. There is no rhyme nor reason why these tiny, transient creatures in their mossy green tropical mountain forests should have such extravagant colours and patterns. It is not for camouflage, so it’s probably just happy ludus naturae (Latin for ‘nature’s game or play’). In eX’s hands, their beauty has become an eloquent memorial to the destruction wrought by Homo sapiens (our scientific name in Latin, meaning ‘wise man’ —what an ironic name!), and, through her art, eX can, of course, reach a much wider audience than any scientist’s publications. So I have been happily complicit in eX’s subversive aims for many years now, always looking for ever more treasures for her to paint. Most generously, eX has called our relationship a collaboration; however, in my eyes, it has been a precious gift that has enriched my life for more than 20 years. eX first appeared in my office with a heartbreaking little watercolour of a dead butterfly, which she had extracted from her car grill, to ask for some specimens to paint for one of her vanitas-themed watercolours. As always, when artists ask to paint the beautiful butterflies in the Australian National Insect Collection (ANIC), I tempted eX with a small box of my nocturnal, and hence usually unseen, little moths, with spectacular success. 1 She was back in the collection the next day, and we very quickly recognised each other as equally fanatical in our pursuits. To my great delight, she chose to concentrate on the moth family that I have studied for nearly 50 years — the Southern Hemisphere representatives of the Tortricidae , the leafroller family. She remained faithful to her task too, though there was no shortage of other opportunities once my colleagues saw her work. As taxonomists, we base our classifications mostly on internal morphology, and I was intrigued by how quickly eX began to recognise relationships just from the insects’ wing patterns, an insight that is nearly impossible to express in words. Our moths have come a long way in eX’s hands — from her early sketches and her 2001 exhibition ‘sp.’ at Helen Maxwell Gallery, Canberra, with 27 portraits of microlepidoptera paired with arrowheads, the first indication that eX was not really interested in just painting pretty, little moths. I well remember eX’s horrified face at the end of opening night, when she asked herself, and me, if her works were worthwhile since they had almost all sold. I saw that face again 20 years later, in 2021, at the end of the opening of ‘Double Crossed’ at Beaver Galleries, where Canberra had done itself proud and every painting displayed a red dot, with eX facing the eX’s influence obviously goes much further than bringing the inspirations and joys of art into my rational scientific life . . .