IZABELA PLUTA
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ABOUT

Izabela Pluta was born in Warsaw, Poland, and migrated to Australia in 1987. She lives and works between the lands of the Awabakal and Worimi in Awabakal country (Newcastle, NSW) and the lands of the Bidjigal and Gadigal (Paddington, Sydney). Pluta completed her undergraduate studies in fine art at The University of Newcastle and her Master of Fine Art at The University of New South Wales. In 2017, she went on to complete her PhD in the Faculty of Creative Arts, The University of Wollongong, entitled Allegories of Diaspora: Gleaning the residues of spatial and temporal misalignments. Pluta lectures in photography at UNSW Arts, Design & Architecture in Sydney.

“Pluta’s permanence as an artist arises in part from her two-decade persistence in experimentation with the form: photography. While she also employs sculpture, sound, installation and film in her work, her rule breaking with photography makes hers an ever-evolving language, as she wrestles with the visual articulation of tensions between diametrically opposed elements.” - Ineke Dane, Art Collector #93 Jul-Sept 2020, p157

Pluta’s studio practice embraces photography as a way of interpreting and re-conceptualising the function that images have in the present. Negotiating the possibilities of how material forms come together, she draws largely on finding, fragmenting, translating and reconfiguring things that are both photographed and found. Conceptually anchored in the effects of globalisation and Pluta’s own personal experience as a migrant to Australia, her creative pursuit seeks to articulate a fluid mode of moving through and being in the world. These concepts have cultivated a discursive photographic vocabulary as a purveyor of temporality, mutability and the impermanence of places. Pluta mediates on images with all their potential connections all at once, questioning how things from one place fit into another and speaking to experiences of place in the face of our changing environmental and societal condition.

Pluta was awarded the Perimeter Small Book Prize which led to her debut artist book, Figures of Slippage and Oscillation, released by Perimeter in 2019. Alongside this debut book release, Pluta was commissioned to create a significant new work, Apparent distance, by the Art Gallery of New South Wales for The National 2019: new Australian art. Apparent distance formed an undulating image plane across the AGNSW’s Entrance Court requiring viewers to navigate shifting terrain through the complexity of the photographic elements. In 2018 Pluta was the inaugural artist for the Marrgu Residency at Durrmu Arts Aboriginal Corporation in Peppimenarti. In the same year, Pluta presented new work at The Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney; and in Form N-X00 at the US Pavilion at the Biennale Architettura, Venice, Italy (in collaboration with Other Architects). She has also been the recipient of various awards and fellowships including the Bowness Photography Prize (2020), the invitational acquisitive award, 15 Artists (2020), the Qantas Foundation Encouragement of Australian Contemporary Art Award (2009), The Ian Potter Cultural Trust Grant (2008) and The Freedman Traveling Arts Scholarship (2007).

Pluta has held solo exhibitions at Artspace Ideas Platform, Sydney (2017), The Glasshouse Regional Gallery, Port Macquarie (2019); UTS Gallery, Sydney (2014); Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale (2012); Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne (2011); 24 HR Art, Darwin (2010) and The Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (2009). Other notable group exhibitions include Civilization: the way we live now, The National Gallery of Victoria (2019); Watching the clouds pass the moon, MAC Lake Macquarie (2016); Timelapse, Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale (2016); Through the lens, Horsham Regional Gallery (2014); and Foreplay, Plimsoll Gallery, Hobart (2012). Pluta has undertaken national residencies including at International Art Space (IASKA) Kellerberrin, as well as International residencies in Tokyo, Barcelona, Paris, Belfast and Beijing.

Pluta’s first European solo exhibition, Variable depth, shallow water, was staged in 2021 at Spazju Kreattiv, Malta’s National Centre for Creativity in Valetta. A selection of cyanotypes that comprise Blue spectrum and descent have been featured alongside an experimental text by Pluta in HØH JOURNAL’s inaugural issue, Disrupt - a new platform for contemporary art and literature that launched in 2020.

About

Izabela Pluta was born in Warsaw, Poland, and migrated to Australia in 1987. She lives and works between the lands of the Awabakal and Worimi in Awabakal country (Newcastle, NSW) and the lands of the Bidjigal and Gadigal (Paddington, Sydney). Pluta completed her undergraduate studies in fine art at The University of Newcastle and her Master of Fine Art at The University of New South Wales. In 2017, she went on to complete her PhD in the Faculty of Creative Arts, The University of Wollongong, entitled Allegories of Diaspora: Gleaning the residues of spatial and temporal misalignments. Pluta lectures in photography at UNSW Arts, Design & Architecture in Sydney.

Izabela Pluta is an artist whose practice has developed a unique visual language of spatial and representational means to signal a different modality of vision. Her work explores the intersection of photography with concepts of time and memory, and questions of place. Conceptually anchored in the effects of globalisation and her own personal experience as a migrant to Australia, Pluta’s creative pursuit seeks to articulate a fluid mode of moving through and being in theworld.

Pluta works across collage, film-based photography, sculpture, installation and video. Her poetic and multifaceted approach is characterised by processes of fragmentation, dislocation, reconfiguration and embodied fieldwork. These methods disrupt linear narratives of of time- and record-keeping, and, in doing so, challenge historical uses of documents and images as authoritative devices. Pluta is attuned to the complexity of an image’s materiality, and she imbues other mediums with a kind of photographic thinking.

Drawing from a rich array of photographed and found sources — including personal and public archives, oceanic cartography and 20th-century geographic publications — Pluta’s work navigates the subjectivity of experience and existence. From tracing geological changes across deep time to documenting faster changing anthropogenic, cultural, environmental and societal shifts, she considers the plurality of place in an ever-changing world.

Grounded in fieldwork, her sustained meditations on the embodied experience of place have led her to explore underwater diving sites such as the recently collapsed geological structure Dwejra Azure Window in Gozo, a small island off Malta, and the mythologised underwater stone structures off the coast of Yonaguni Island, Okinawa, Japan. Pluta’s use of inherently unstable materials, such as light sensitive photo paper and alchemical processes, reflects her awareness of the impermanence and reflexivity of images to operate as both records and a unique ledgers of transience.

“Pluta’s permanence as an artist arises in part from her two-decade persistence in experimentation with the form: photography. While she also employs sculpture, sound, installation and film in her work, her rule breaking with photography makes hers an ever-evolving language, as she wrestles with the visual articulation of tensions between diametrically opposed elements.” - Ineke Dane, Art Collector #93 Jul-Sept 2020, p157

Pluta was awarded the Perimeter Small Book Prize which led to her debut artist book, Figures of Slippage and Oscillation, released by Perimeter in 2019. In the same year, Pluta was commissioned to create a significant new work, Apparent distance, by the Art Gallery of New South Wales for The National 2019: new Australian art: Apparent distance formed an undulating image plane across the AGNSW’s Entrance Court requiring viewers to navigate shifting terrain through the complexity of the photographic elements. In 2018 Pluta was the inaugural artist for the Marrgu Residency at Durrmu Arts Aboriginal Corporation in Peppimenarti. In the same year, Pluta presented new work at The Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney; and in Form N-X00 at the US Pavilion at the Biennale Architettura, Venice, Italy (in collaboration with Other Architects). She has also been the recipient of various grants and awards including from The Australia Council for the Arts, The Qantas Foundation Encouragement of Australian Contemporary Art Award (2009), The Ian Potter Cultural Trust Grant (2008) and The Freedman Traveling Arts Scholarship (2007). 

Pluta has held solo exhibitions at Artspace Ideas Platform, Sydney (2017), The Glasshouse Regional Gallery, Port Macquarie (2019); UTS Gallery, Sydney (2014); Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale (2012); Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne (2011); 24 HR Art, Darwin (2010) and The Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (2009).  Other notable group exhibitions include Civilization: the way we live now, The National Gallery of Victoria (2019); Watching the clouds pass the moon, MAC Lake Macquarie (2016); Timelapse, Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale (2016); Through the lens, Horsham Regional Gallery (2014); and Foreplay, Plimsoll Gallery, Hobart (2012). Pluta has undertaken national residencies including at International Art Space (IASKA) Kellerberrin, as well as International residencies in Tokyo, Barcelona, Paris, Belfast and Beijing.

Pluta’s first European solo exhibition, Variable depth, shallow water, was staged in 2021 at Spazju Kreattiv, Malta’s National Centre for Creativity in Valetta. A selection of cyanotypes that comprise Blue spectrum and descent have been featured alongside an experimental text by Pluta in HØH JOURNAL’s inaugural issue, Disrupt - a new platform for contemporary art and literature that launched in 2020. 

Photo: Saskia Wilson

Photo: Saskia Wilson