Ascending air, unfolding motion

Ascending air, unfolding motion was created through the commissioning support of The Lock-Up, Newcastle, Australia as part of Radical Slowness, curated by Anna May Kirk and Tai Mitsuji.

Ascending air, unfolding motion (2022) pierces through the ceiling of the Lock-Up’s exercise yard. Pluta reassembles old art school easels into armature, which extend from the converted police station’s weathered floor out into the open skies beyond. Clinging to these sculptural forms are images made from up-scaled, cyanotype-based source material of clouds mounted on aluminium. The cyanotype imagery is a reference to a photograph the artist’s father took through the aeroplane window, on the day her family emigrated from Poland to Australia in 1987. Reaching back across time, the artwork uses the Cloud Study: A Pictorial Guide (1960) to determine the weather and cloud patterns at this moment of departure. Here, memory feels alive, and assumes an almost active dimension. Clouds float by, in the air above The Lock-Up, yet also remain forever suspended in Pluta’s work below. Pluta’s sculptures connect tendrils of distinct moments in time, collapsing the past and the present into one another.

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review in The Saturday Paper