© Edwina Richards
Izabela Pluta’s work explores the concept of ‘place’ through photography, shaped by her migrant experience and drawing attention to the impermanence of geographic boundaries and the effects of globalisation on culture, politics, and the environment. Her methods, including fieldwork and embodied practice, involve locating, fragmenting, translating, and reconfiguring photographed and found materials, disrupting the image plane to complicate the viewing experience and extend the possibilities of two-dimensional photographs. Pluta’s engagement with collected ephemera critiques systems of knowledge and image-making driven by the pursuit of understanding natural forces.
Pluta was born in Warsaw, Poland, and migrated to Australia in 1987. She lives and works between Awabakal country (Newcastle, NSW) and the lands of the Bidjigal and Gadigal (Paddington, Sydney). She completed her undergraduate studies in fine art at The University of Newcastle, her Master of Fine Art at The University of New South Wales, and, in 2017, 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 is an artist whose practice has developed a unique visual language of spatial and representational means to signal a different modality of vision. She 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 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, Pluta’s sustained meditations on the embodied experience of place have led her to explore underwater sites such as the recently collapsed geological structure Dwejra Azure Window in Gozo, Malta, and the mythologised underwater stone structures off the coast of Yonaguni Island, Okinawa, Japan. Her 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 unique ledgers of transience.
Pluta is exclusively represented by Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert.
