eX de Medici: Human skulls & helmets, signs of mortality

Mon 21 Aug 2023

Exploring the 40-year career of leading Australian artist eX de Medici, ‘Beautiful Wickedness’ focused on her meticulous, panoramic watercolours and traces the genesis of her practice through formative artworks.

Throughout her practice, de Medici has remained true to her early Punk principles — a suspicion of authority, an ethos of political agitation and a disrespect for capitalism, consumerism and mass culture. She has been similarly steadfast in her resolve to unmask misuses of power. Also present in her work are references that reveal her fascination with botanical art, illuminated manuscripts and the coded symbolism of seventeenth-century Dutch still-life painting.

These complex messages permeate de Medici’s exquisitely detailed watercolours and works of decorative art that denounce the violence around us that is ‘hiding in plain sight’. In this context, her sumptuous and richly detailed artworks emerge as a carefully orchestrated strategy to entice audiences and urge them to think critically about the world around them.

Skulls are a recurring motif in de Medici’s work. They refer to her practice as a tattooist, and her engagement with Dutch still-life paintings, known as vanitas or memento mori, which is Latin for ‘remember, you must die’.

eX de Medici ‘Blue (Bower/Bauer)’ 1998–2000

Blue (Bower/Bauer) 1998-2000 (illustrated) represents the first of de Medici’s suite of ‘big pictures’, the artwork represents colonisation and is coded with symbols that critique the imperialist phenomena, additionally it refers to the satin bowerbird who hoards and adorns its nest with blue objects, and pays homage to the work of Austrian botanical artist Ferdinand Bauer (1760–1826), who accompanied Matthew Flinders on his circumnavigation of Australia (1801–03).

eX de Medici ‘The theory of everything’ 2005

The Theory of Everything 2005 (illustrated) includes symbols that, for de Medici, represent the intemperance of ‘John Howard’s monetary policies’ and ‘neoliberal excess’. Featured are an imaginary, diamond-studded poodle — a dog that was originally bred as a water retriever and clipped so its thick coat would protect its vital organs, only to have its grooming assume purely decorative purposes — and Semper Augustus tulips, a reference to the first documented boom and bust that beset seventeenth-century Holland when tulip bulbs the Dutch East India Company imported from the Ottoman Empire were bartered for untenable prices. These emblems of extravagance nestle beside more sinister objects, including exploded ammunition and a Smith & Wesson M&P pistol. The tableau recalls Dutch still-life paintings that warn of the lure of worldly possessions. In the background looms the Ranger Uranium Mine, in the Northern Territory, which de Medici explains ‘lies in the middle of [Kakadu] national park. On traditional lands . . . So [it is] the idea of wealth at any cost, and acquisition at any cost.

eX de Medici ‘Live the (Big Black) Dream’ 2006

Another of de Medici’s ‘big pictures’, Live the (Big Black) Dream 2006 (illustrated) represents the consequences of the greed that she denounced in The Theory of Everything. De Medici made the ‘train wreck waiting to happen’ ahead of the 2007–08 Global Financial Crisis, envisaging the artwork as the capitalist system derailed. Like many of de Medici’s watercolours, the painting is laden with symbols: for instance, an AR-15 machine gun — discomfortingly referred to as ‘America’s rifle’. Also included is a miniaturised image of the atomic bomb that the United States dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki in 1945 to end World War Two. In the artist’s imagining, the missile is being towed by a weevil, a beetle that invades by stealth. The idea of covert acts hiding in plain sight is underscored by the presence of a CCTV camera, a reference to surveillance in our networked age.

eX de Medici ‘Slave’ 2004

eX de Medici ‘Skull (blue and green)’ 2004

eX de Medici ‘Desire Overcoming Duality’ 2006

In the watercolours Slave 2004; Skull (Blue and Green) 2004, and Desire Overcoming Duality 2006 (illustrated), skulls are covered in moth scales, which signify nature, with the uncomfortable pairing representing the divisions we have driven between ourselves and the natural world. Slave depicts the First Fleet ship HMS Sirius, wrecked off Norfolk Island in 1790 at the time de Medici’s convict ancestors were interned there. Skull (Blue and Green) features the ‘pelt’ of an unclassified north Queensland moth whose habitat was threatened by a planned US missile base, with the red-and-white stripes denoting the American flag. Desire Overcoming Duality represents the military-industrial complex — the enmeshed relationship between the government, the military and the defence industry.

eX de Medici ‘Skinny Day Ambush (Super Family)’ 2007

eX de Medici ‘Cure for Pain’ 2010–11

De Medici has described the skull as ‘the best memento mori image there is’, referring to the artistic tradition that signifies life’s transience. In recent years, she adopted the helmet as an alternative, as ever more artists began including skulls in their work. Her decision was also informed by her appointment as an Official War Artist with the Australian War Memorial (2009), who commissioned her to capture the activities of Australian peacekeepers deployed with the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI). Cure for Pain 2010–11 (illustrated), made after her commission concluded, features helmets from a range of countries and conflicts from the colonial period to the present, including Afghanistan and Iraq. The helmets — or ‘brain buckets’ — are scattered across a field of poppies that, historically, represent war dead and reference the use of opium as a battlefield drug. A memorial of sorts, the painting denounces our predisposition for violence and the futility of armed conflict.

eX de Medici ‘Bucket for a Blood Supply’ 2020

De Medici frequently uses images of helmets in her work as stand-ins for the human skull. The helmet is sometimes referred to as a ‘brain bucket’ because it shields and, in worst-case scenarios, contains the brain when it is impacted by bullets or explosives. De Medici painted the helmet Bucket for a Blood Supply 2020 (illustrated) for the QAGOMA exhibition ‘Full Face: Artists’ Helmets’, held in conjunction with ‘The Motorcycle: Design, Art, Desire’ (2020–21).

‘eX de Medici: Beautiful Wickedness’ / 1.2 and 1.3 (Eric and Marion Taylor Gallery) Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) / 24 June until 2 October 2023.