Bobby thumbed a diesel down just before it rained
Oil on canvas, 350 × 200 x 1 cm, 2025
Artwork Statement
Memory is not fixed; each act of recall reshapes it.
My practice explores memory as something layered, unstable, and continuously reformed across generations. This work brings together my own recollections, my mother’s photographic archive, and the inherited gestures carried through my lineage. Using my grandmother’s paintbrushes, I approach painting as a material dialogue, where objects themselves hold and transmit memory.
The composition resists a singular narrative. Through collage-like layering and translucent surfaces, time becomes non-linear — folded and overlapping rather than sequential. Figures and forms emerge as fragments: some clear, others obscured, reflecting the way memory exists in partial and shifting states.
Within Distributed Worlds, the work considers how memory is dispersed across bodies, materials, and histories. It positions painting as a living archive — not a record of the past, but a process through which memory is continually rewritten through connection, embodiment, and care.
Artist Bio
Idgie Barbara Kagan is a Melbourne-based painter whose practice explores memory, materiality, and matrilineal inheritance. Working with family photographs and inherited paintbrushes from her late grandmother, she creates layered oil paintings that blur the boundaries between past and present. A 2025 Honours graduate of RMIT University, Kagan’s work reflects on shifting geographies between the United States and Australia, examining memory as a fluid, evolving process shaped by personal and ancestral histories.
