Sleep Rhythms, 2023
Digital collage comprising gelatin silver photographs and lumen prints, reproduced as a digital print in four parts
Hoarding Commission for the Newcastle Art Gallery

Izabela Pluta is interested in the ways that a photographic image can simultaneously represent a single instant and an extended duration. Pluta uses this dual ability of the photograph to capture the impermanence of places and how they change over time. Pluta's new work for the Newcastle Art Gallery hoarding is a response to the changing of this site and the layers of history it contains.

The artist began her project by photographing the distinctive interior of the Gallery while it was empty and waiting for construction to begin. Pluta then projected these digital images onto the walls of the gallery using a data projector and photographed the same interior spaces again, using film. She also took 'lumen’, or light prints by placing photographic paper into the shafts of light that move across the gallery floor in the afternoon. The resulting analogue photographic images were developed then scanned and layered over each other, to create the images on the hoarding. This collage of images can be thought of as a cumulative portrait of Newcastle Art Gallery at an expectant moment in time.