Samantha Littley: Curator, Australian Art QAGOMA

Samantha Littley takes a walk-through eX de Medici’s upcoming retrospective, Beautiful Wickedness at The Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art.

Interview with Claire Summers

Claire Summers / We rely on art to ask, rather than answer, the pertinent questions of our time. What individual questions prompted the curation of eX de Medici’s Beautiful Wickedness?

Samantha Littley / It has been an incredible privilege to reflect on eX’s 40-year career and to make sense of what have, at times, seemed to be unexpected shifts in direction. I wanted to establish whether there was a throughline from her early ephemeral practice, which encompassed photocopy, posters, performance and other transitory materials, to the sumptuous and richly decorated watercolours for which she is now known.

The answer lies in the collectivist ideology she has lived and worked by, a philosophy informed by Punk that was fundamental to her formative years and continues to guide her. While the idea is often mentioned in passing, it is more important than that. ‘Punk’s suspicion of authority, [the movement’s] ethos of political activism and its disrespect for capitalism, consumerism and mass culture runs like a lightning rod through [eX’s] practice, which is as consistent as it is confounding.’1

eX de Medici Ecocide (Omicron), 2021 watercolour on paper 114 x 124 cm

CS / QAGOMA has established itself as one of the most significant institutions presenting contemporary art in Australia today, with your role as a curator of Australian art being essential in shaping the story told by in the exhibitions you present to the public. What story do you hope to tell in the curation of this exhibition?

SL / The word ‘curate’ means to care for, and I take that responsibility seriously. It requires a huge leap of faith to make a career from your creativity, and then to allow someone else to present that career to the public. In this case, I’ve been fortunate to have the chance to steward eX through this process. Together, we have metaphorically rummaged through her back room (the ‘Room of Dorian Gray’, as she calls it). It has been a major undertaking for an artist who has never looked back, always seeking to push her practice further and uncover new truths, no matter how unpalatable. I tell her ‘that’s why it’s called art “history”’, and we have a laugh. At the same time, it’s a profound and rewarding experience to look across an artist’s oeuvre, pick out the threads and present them in ways that audiences can appreciate. I have loved every minute of it.

In a way, eX’s practice sits outside contemporary art, a place she is happy to occupy. She chooses to work in watercolour – a medium often regarded as anachronistic –as part of a strategy to entice the conservative viewers she wishes to provoke and rebuke, and because her anti-elitist impulse is to make art that is broadly accessible.

Samantha Littley and eX de Medici speaking about Cure for Pain 2010 (Collection: Australian War Memorial) at the Memorial’s Treloar Technology Centre, Canberra, February 2023.

Photographer: Josh Thies | Image courtesy: QAGOMA

The exhibition will establish that the issues we are increasingly concerned by – environmental protection, the scourge of domestic violence, misuses of power by governments and corporations – are problems that eX has been turning her mind to for four decades. She was ahead of her time and has remained true to her principles.

CS / Beautiful Wickedness represents the most significant exhibition of work from eX de Medici. In what ways has the curation of this exhibition sought to expand upon the themes in her work?

SL / The exhibition will bring eX’s early work and her tattoo practice into conversation with the watercolours she has been making since the late 1990s. The show will begin with a sequence of these large-scale, visually seductive works, then introduce viewers to the artworks that started it all.

Significant among them are two pioneering works that she made in the mid-1980s using Canon prototype gridding photocopiers, Scene from an Ivory Tower (Pistol) and Scene from an Ivory Tower (Wedding Cake); a collection of posters that have miraculously survived from an era in which she was pasting them up on street hoardings to create exhibition opportunities for herself; and six Ilfochrome photographs included in the 1996 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art that document her tattoo practice, alongside a selection of ‘blood swabs’ she has collected from clients post-tattoo, dating back as far as 1991. From there, the exhibition will return to the watercolours and the works of decorative art that have been informed by them, including Shotgun Wedding Dress/Cleave 2015, inspired by Julie Andrews’s wedding gown from The Sound of Music, and The Seat of Love and Hate 2017–18, which belong to a series that foregrounds the corrosive effects of coercive control.

The final room is devoted to the moth/weapons from her two most recent series, shown at Beaver Galleries, Canberra, and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney, respectively. This spectacular, light-filled room will be somewhat of a reprieve from the dark heart of the exhibition and promises to leave viewers thinking about the complex socio-political narratives in the works.

CS / We often revere artists for their contribution to culture or their influence on the zeitgeist. What sense of culture or modernity is being cultivated by the works in this exhibition?

SL / eX’s practice is a critique of the capitalist system that is trampling on, and triumphing over, nature. She calls it ‘belling the cat’, by which she means drawing a circle around the inequities and hypocrisies that define our world. Her work is both timeless, and of her time. There is a groundswell of people who are echoing her plea that humanity and, specifically, our political leaders, comprehend the consequences of environmental degradation and climate change and take steps to arrest and repair the damage.

CS / What new awareness do you hope viewers will take away from their experience of this exhibition?

I think people will appreciate the messages eX meticulously embeds in her work, the dedicated way in which she has pursued uncomfortable truths, and her commitment to taking paths less followed.