Not since 2009, when UK musician and visual artist Brian Eno was the first-ever artist invited by Vivid Sydney to light up the sails of Sydney Opera House, has this hugely popular after-dark event placed the spotlight so firmly on an individual whose work links artistic experimentation to political activism.
Following Eno’s 77 Million Paintings, presented 16 years ago, one might say Vivid’s curators have chosen artists for their signature light-art event whose work has been more about aesthetics and culture than activism and politics.
Read: Who gets to light up the Sydney Opera House sails?
But this year Vivid LIVE is celebrating an artist whose legacy is inextricably linked to Australia’s queer rights movement of the 1970s and 1980s, and whose arts speaks stridently about the experiences of the then-persecuted minority community in Australia of that period.
Who is David McDiarmid?
Tasmanian-born visual artist and designer David McDiarmid (1952–1995) is Vivid LIVE’s chosen artist this year, and while a series of stunning projections of his work heap joy on crowds at Sydney Harbour each night of this year’s festival, many people may not realise that his works are about much more than experimentations with colour and light.
According to this year’s Vivid LIVE Lighting of the Sails co-curator Dr Sally Gray, who was a close friend of McDiarmid until his untimely death from AIDS-related complications 30 years ago, aged 43, the artist’s work speaks first about his dearly-held values around human rights and equality.
“David’s art was always about justice, joy and beauty,” Gray tells ArtsHub on the phone from Sydney, where she has travelled from her hometown of Melbourne to oversee Vivid LIVE’s program, which will be the most significant display of McDiarmid’s work since the National Gallery of Victoria’s 2014 retrospective, David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me.
“If you look at his early work and his early writing in the 1970s, it’s clear that his art, like his politics, came out of his personal experiences as a gay man who was coming out of the closet in a society where that act meant that you were putting your body at risk of violence, and potentially of being arrested,” she adds.
Read: Biennale of Sydney 2026 prompted by forgotten histories
The early works Gray mentions range from cut-and-paste collaged work on paper to bold holographic mosaics and prints. Notable pieces, created in the late 1970s and early 1980s include his Disco Kwilts series which reference his experiences of the Paradise Garage (nightclub) scene in 1970s New York.
Importantly, while living in both New York and Australia during the 1970s, McDiarmid was not only a prolific maker, but an energetic political campaigner for gay rights, and took part in numerous milestone political actions with members of the US and Australian queer communities.
In the early 1970s he joined the political group Melbourne Gay Liberation, after which he helped found a Sydney equivalent, Sydney Gay Liberation, in 1972.
Then, in June 1978, McDiarmid was part of the first ever gay Mardi Gras in Sydney, which was a peaceful daytime march and evening street parade that notoriously ended with police violence and 53 arrests (which the NSW Police Force finally apologised for in 2016).
“I can remember David saying to me that from what he saw, it was the women [in the Mardi Gras] who were the bravest [during the police raid],” Gray recalls.
“David saw the police going berserk while he was hiding under a car – that’s what he told me,” she adds.
After that ugly, yet profound moment of change for the gay rights movement in Australia, McDiarmid went on to be work closely with the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, and served as its Artistic Director from 1988 to 1992.
Art before politics or politics before art?
But as someone so dedicated to political causes all his life, were there ever any tensions for McDiarmid between his life in activism his life in the art world?
In Gray’s view, the artist simply wasn’t interested in defining the two things as separate entities.
“For him, politics, art and life were one – they were completely enmeshed,” she says, describing McDiarmid’s first ever solo exhibition at Hogarth Galleries in 1976 as a good example.
“That exhibition was called Secret Love, and it was about closeted gay sexuality,” she tells ArtsHub.
“It was the first exhibition in Australia of a gay lib artist whose work was explicitly liberationist. And unlike other gay Australian artists at the time, in whose work you might pick up coded meanings around homoeroticism, David’s work was clearly explicit and agitating [political] work.”
Then, after almost two decades spent working in this bold, defiant collaged style, in the early 1990s McDiramid introduced a new medium to his practice, experimenting with minimalist block colour techniques and making digital poster art.
His Rainbow Aphorism (1994 – 1995) series is, like its title, a suite of vibrantly-coloured statement pieces which put some of the artist’s pithy personal maxims in spotlight for deeper consideration and critique.
Framed within ribbons of cascading rainbow colours, the artist writes that, ‘LIFETIMES ARE NOT WHAT THEY USED TO BE’ and that ‘THE FAMILY TREE STOPS HERE DARLING’ – phrases imbued with both wit and pathos.
For Gray, these works reflect McDiarmid’s feelings about the AIDS crisis at the time – a moment when the artist had personal and political experiences to share.
“His Rainbow Aphorism works are political in that they express David’s response to the AIDS crisis, and part of that was about discrimination and injustice,” she explains.
“But they are also highly experimental for their time, because David was one of the first artists to work with digital printing techniques at the time.
“Also visually, they are so joyful and celebratory,” she adds. “So they are really fabulous works because of their humour and vibrancy, and I think that’s also why they remain very popular.”
McDiarmid’s 1990s poster art: historical works or markers of our times?
As audiences flock to see MacDiarmid’s signature styles emblazoned across Sydney Opera House for Vivid LIVE, it’s interesting to reflect on why MacDiarmid’s art – particularly his Rainbow Aphorism series – has grown in popularity since his death in 1995.
This strong audience pull towards his work begs the question of whether contemporary audiences’ love of his art is due to its political meaning which they see as resonating with their lives and the world today.
“A few years ago, I would have said no, David’s work doesn’t speak so directly to the moment we are in, or that we were in then,” Gray comments.
“But now, I think we are in special moment because of the tragic situation that the world is [in],” she continues.
“I think this public display of David’s work is a serendipitous juxtaposition for this reason – to have an artist whose work is so insistent on justice, joy and beauty against this backdrop.
“This sense of justice and of joy are things we so desperately need in this current moment,” she concludes.
Lighting of the Sails: Kiss of Light by David McDiarmid is showing at Sydney Opera House, Bennelong Point, Sydney until 14 June 2025. Learn more.
