eX de Medici
“When you've got nothing to lose, you can be the most dangerous of them.”
eX de Medici interview with Bec Mac at the Opening of Beautiful Wickedness QAGOMA
‘Beautiful Wickedness’ is the most significant exhibition of work by celebrated Australian artist eX de Medici yet staged. The survey at QAGOMA examines the artist’s central concerns, including the fragility of life, global affairs, greed and commerce, and the universal themes of power, conflict, and death. It was great to interview eX who choose to do the interview in true eX style with her back to the camera.
BEC: Bec Mac here at QAGOMA and I'm talking quietly because I'm in a very powerful room. Today is the opening of eX de Medici’s Beautiful Wickedness and I'm here with the artist herself. I've just experienced the most incredible, aesthetic, mind-blowing moments by looking at the work and I'm going to have a chat with eX.
How are you?
eX: I'm good, thank you.
BEC MAC : Thank you for taking the time to chat. First of all, I just want to say your work is so incredible, the detail, the depth, but also the contrast and the contradictions between the beauty and the darkness, and the death, and the life.
I want to talk about this work in particular, The Shotgun Wedding Dress because you're taking on, I guess, the hideous scourge that is domestic violence here in Australia. Can you talk us through how this work came about?
eX: Okay, the painting behind is the foundation of the fabric [of the dress]. So the painting existed first. Simon Elliott, who is the deputy director of QAGOMA. So, [for context], I'm a Canberra person, Simon was deputy director at the NGA. He saw this picture and was a bit confronted by it at an exhibition in Sydney. I made a crack that it would make a great shotgun wedding dress - being that I'm not the marrying sort - I don't, kind of, get into that. [The joke] was [then] sort of forgotten by that point. Then, sometime later, seven or eight months later, I got a phone call from Simon saying we want to commission you for that wedding dress. I'd already forgotten about that idiotic crack I made!
So it took us eleven weeks from beginning to end. It was a really fast project because so many people were involved. I think we had the dressmaker, the printers, uh, who else was involved…
Oh! And it was based actually on what is now conceived as the most famous wedding dress in history. So my friend in Canberra, Yani Liangas, a man I went to art school with - was a couple of years younger than me has enormously weird taste, and exquisite taste at the same time, is quite an enigma an enigmatic man - I told him well we're working on this. I'm making this wedding dress. We're just discussing what I might do, what design might be.
And we're discussing various famous wedding dresses and he just said, “Oh it's got to be Julie Andrews wedding dress from the sound of music.
BEC MAC: That is one of my favourites!
eX: It is now conceived as the most beautiful wedding dress in cinema. So at the time it was nothing! It was made by nuns, which I thought was really funny - in a period of the invasion of the Nazis. I thought it was quite an interesting thing to discuss, during a time of increasing right-wing political viewpoints in this country. So there's a subtext to the choice of this wedding dress.
The Shotgun Wedding Dress
This work is inspired by Julie Andrew’s charater Maria Von Trapp from the Sound of Music.
Also, I use the orchids because they are always perceived as highly sexualized flowers. A friend who's a surgeon had a look at this picture and he said, “Oh eX, how interesting, you've performed an orchidectomy in your work.” And, I discovered that an orchidectomy is a removal of a man's testicles.
BEC MAC: That was the first I've ever heard of that, but that's a really interesting procedure there eX.
eX: So you know the whole premise of a shotgun wedding is one that is a forced wedding, or it’s one where the woman is pregnant and she has to get married, or is forced to be married, at a time where a woman couldn’t not be married and have children. It was, you know, a crime. So it has all these sorts of connotations of a forced marriage or a marriage that is not for the best.
BEC MAC: It's that kind of innate violence.
eX: Indeed. Which brings us back to Julie Andrews and you know this shotgun wedding she had. In a couple of hours the nuns made her a wedding dress and they escaped out of Austria. So, I felt as though it's all sort of a strange knot-from-the-picture, what the picture is, and what the dress is, it's kind of… it always makes me laugh I have to say.
BEC MAC: I think it's very indicative of what I've seen here today, that a “strange knot” is a great way to start when describing your work. Between the surface, the craftsmanship, and the ability to paint. I've never seen [anything] like this before eX! But then, you dig deeper and there’s such a complex story of contradiction around power, beauty, and love.
What I loved is finding out that you started off as a punk and I can still feel the punk vibes. Tell us about that.
Early photographic work
eX: I’m a Canberra kid. The punk movement in Canberra was huge. I remember we went to Saints gigs. The Saints played a lot in Canberra. I remember Chris Bailey stopping the band because it was going nuts at the ANU bar. He said, “I don't know what's going on in Canberra. Are they putting something in your water?”.
It was also a time too, the period of Margaret Thatcher, of Malcolm Fraser. You know it wasn’t just here…
BEC MAC: Up here, Joh Bejelke Peterson…
eX: … and mass youth unemployment.
I was out of school. I didn't know one person who had a job. 49% youth unemployment at that time. It was really tough. I think too [that] they were very conservative governments who found that young people would be better off going somewhere else.
So when you've got nothing to lose, you can be the most dangerous of them.
BEC MAC : That's good advice eX. I really like that as well you're giving me a lot of really great little pieces of information. For me, like, just seeing your body of work and seeing, I guess, where you started, and then into the tattoo work, and then blood work - you've really forged your own path. It feels like you're really such an individual in the way that you've made your work. Do you feel like anyone else's taken these steps, or do you feel like you're a bit of a Pioneer?
eX: Oh look they're a constant, you know, fabulous people that we move along behind. I hate that term, ‘standing on someone's shoulders’, but no - everything is in a continuum. So you can't claim anything specific. You're just in a line of time.
The theory of everything 2005
watercolour and metallic pigment on Arches paper
114.3 x 176.3cm
BEC MAC: Your work, the detail, is phenomenal. What is the process here? It must be very time intensive, but you must love doing it.
eX: Yes, I've often been asked by people why I don't have a life - it’s because it takes so long to make the work! But I'm dedicated to the work, so it's a heavy place for me - I don't have any problems about spending my life doing it. It's kind of proof that it existed.
I mark every single day I work on these pieces so I know exactly how long they take. That's proof of life in a way.
BEC MAC: Finally this exhibition opens tomorrow to the public. What would you like people to take away from being in the presence of your work and exploring this exhibition?
eX: You can’t ever vouch for how a person sees something, or whether it tweaks something in them. You can only just hope that you don't get your head chopped off - that's a good way to start!
[Laughter]
BEC MAC: Well thank you! I love how you still got your punk vibes going on - it's excellent! But thank you so much for your time. Congratulations it is phenomenal work, and I really am just blown away by it!
eX: Thank you so much it was great to talk to you!
