Idgie Kagan
Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours)
RMIT University Melbourne
Specialisms: Painting / Fine Art /
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Idgie Kagan
First Name: Idgie
Last Name: Kagan
Specialisms: Painting / Fine Art
Sectors:
My Location: Melbourne, Australia
University / College: RMIT University Melbourne
Course / Program Title: Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours)
About
Idgie Kagan creates intimate oil paintings that layer family photographs with intuitive mark-making, using inherited paintbrushes once belonging to her late grandmother, whom she called Tatia. Her artworks range from small, materially direct canvases (30 × 40 cm) to larger, more ambitious pieces built through translucent layers that obscure yet never fully erase what came before.
Kagan completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at RMIT University in 2025. Having always felt drawn to painting, even before developing technical skill or clear intent, she turned to her practice as a way of processing layered histories shaped by movement between the United States and Australia. This shifting geography, both physical and emotional, informs her understanding of time, memory, and belonging.
Her work explores the visceral bonds of matrilineal inheritance and how ancestral presence can manifest through material engagement. Drawing on photographs from her mother's archive, Kagan investigates memory as a fluid and evolving process rather than a fixed narrative. Her paintings position inherited objects as quasi-agents that actively shape meaning, framing creative practice itself as a form of intergenerational collaboration.
Through this practice-led research, Kagan contributes to contemporary discourse on feminist material practices and trauma-informed approaches to ancestral collaboration, offering painting as a methodology for accessing inherited, embodied knowledge that exists beyond language.
This practice-led research project explores how painting can function as a form of matrilineal collaboration, asking: what might emerge when ancestral presence is invited into the creative process as an active collaborator rather than a passive inspiration? Working with inherited materials, specifically my Tatia's (my mother's mother's) paintbrushes, alongside family photographs taken by my mother, which both hold embodied gestural memory, I investigate how my paintings facilitate dialogue across temporal and familial boundaries. The oil paintings are grounded in family photographs painted with my Tatis' paintbrushes to be resolved as figurative and gestural art works. My methodology also weaves my own knowledge through the paintings by way of intuitive mark-making that honours both control and surrender. In doing so, the research draws on New Materialist frameworks, particularly Jane Bennett's (2010) "thing-power" and Karen Barad's (2007) "hauntological relations of inheritance," positioning inherited objects as quasi-agents carrying their own trajectories and tendencies. The resulting body of artwork contributes to contemporary discourse on feminist material practices and trauma-informed approaches to ancestral collaboration, offering painting as a methodology for accessing inherited somatic knowledge.
Competitions
