Pickled Egg Brine
I was an egg, an egg developed in my mom while she was growing in her mom’s womb. The understanding that I’ve been brewing for that long is mind-scrambling. I am a pickled egg steeped in generational brine.
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.
Artist website – idgiekagan.com
