eX de Medici: Beautiful Wickedness

79 78 EX DE MEDICI: BEAUTIFUL WICKEDNESS Isaac and Ishmael 2007 prospect of having to produce an entirely new body of work for her exhibition at Sullivan+Strumpf, in Sydney, within 12 months. Her friends were told then and there that she would go into purdah tomorrow to paint! eX was not long constrained by depicting scales on the bodies of insects; scales soon migrated into artworks featuring her hated/treasured guns, and we both still giggle at the initial reaction of some moth taxonomists to this juxtaposition of weapon and specimen. My favourite is still the beautiful Isaac and Ishmael 2007 (Private collection, Melbourne), which depicts two pistols shooting each other, featuring the scale pattern of yet another beloved and unnamed New Guinea moth. How better to illustrate the stupidity and destruction of so much of humanity’s efforts? In the next phase of eX’s practice, the tiny moths grew into huge, beautiful creatures with every iridescent scale highlighted in large watercolours, albeit with a sting in the tail in the shape of a weapon or poisonous molecules. An entirely new version of the vanitas images! I couldn’t resist this exuberant escalation of eX’s work and, ever since, I have been in search of ever more spectacular colours and patterns to tempt eX with, though I often feel guilty at the thought of the hours upon hours needed to paint these little jewels. The next chapter in our ‘collaboration’ was a trip to Iran in 2010, where Livia Leu Agosti (who is the wife of my colleague and friend, Donat Agosti) was the Swiss ambassador. eX and I had both dreamed of visiting Iran forever, and the reality surpassed our wildest dreams, largely thanks to Mohsen Hajisaeid, our wonderful travel guide, and his family, who eX became good friends with during three subsequent trips. From that time, Persian imagery could be seen in her watercolours, and the experience of finding these small details brings back treasured memories of our travels, and made up for the realisation that my microlepidoptera had probably run their course as inspiration for eX’s art. So I was hugely delighted then, in 2020, when I received a phone call from eX the day before Canberra entered its first COVID-19 lockdown, in which she told me she wanted to return to our moths after the horrors of painting The Wreckers 2018–19. In response, I grabbed a small box of my personal, and particularly colourful, New Guinea collection to show her; it contained specimens that had lost their abdomens in transit from Switzerland to Australia, and hence were of no scientific value. Regular visits to eX’s studio to admire her progress, and for philosophical/scientific discussions over coffee to set the world to rights, were inspiring events in the first year of the pandemic. Twelve months later, the experience of standing in the exhibition ‘Double Crossed’ at Beaver Galleries, surrounded by huge portraits of my small, but extravagantly coloured, moths — I still remember the specimens sitting on my collecting sheet 50 years ago — is one of the highlights of my life. They sang on the wall! eX is unstoppable, so the next project involved creating chimeras of two related species, one from New Guinea and the other from Australia. A natural progression for her ever-questioning nature, she was asking how relationships are signified by wing patterns. A typical character trait for eX — always upping the ante! I admit I was a bit doubtful about this series, but the results are beautiful, and also subtly disconcerting as our brains try to force a picture of expected symmetry, instead producing a shimmering mirage. So, once again, I had the pleasure of standing in a room full of our little moths! 2 eX’s influence obviously goes much further than bringing the inspirations and joys of art into my rational scientific life — how could anybody resist her demands for civic responsibility? I well remember her question over a cup of coffee: ‘What did you do lately to fulfil your duties as a public scientist?’ eX sets an unremitting example for dedication and discipline, and the many little strokes at the base of her pictures don’t refer to eight-hour days! During her initial residency at ANIC in 2000, she very quickly bonded with the taxonomists, most of us fanatics in our quest to discover and name our fauna. 3 She immediately felt at home, and was shocked to learn that of the more-than-22 000 moth species in Australia, less than half have a name, and hence many will become extinct before we have become aware of their existence. This was the discovery that motivated her to name her first exhibition of moths at Helen Maxwell Gallery ‘sp.’, the abbreviation for ‘species’ which we use on our labels to indicate that a specimen belongs to a species without a name. It has prompted her to call for support for ANIC whenever she can — our Wunderkammer , as she calls it, which houses over 12 million specimens. She has been a quiet, but greatly appreciated, benefactor over the years, and several of us are delighted to have ‘our’ eX watercolours hanging in this retrospective exhibition at QAGOMA in recognition of her support for our little moths. Dr Marianne Horak, Sicily, October 2022