#06 BACK IN ISO | Izabela Pluta

Izabela 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.

In-conversation with Izabela Pluta available via Apple Podcasts here or Vimeo below.

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EXHIBITION INFO

IZABELA PLUTA
An over air pursuit of likeness
2021
latex-based ink-jet prints
118 x 196 cm, 100 x 220 cm

Consisting of two composite images affixed to a wall and a mirror, the work blends visual and textual sources, referencing a photograph Pluta’s father took from an aeroplane window in 1987 when her family emigrated from Poland to Australia.

The artist was reminded of a similar picture she had taken in 2019, when she last travelled overseas. “The idea that my father’s photograph documents my first time seeing the earth from the air feels poignant, particularly at the moment when we can’t travel.”

As her father’s photo coalesced in her mind, Pluta consulted her copy of Cloud study: a pictorial guide (1960) to determine the weather and cloud patterns occurring on the day she and her family left Poland. Selecting the page that closely described the type of clouds recorded in her father’s photograph, the artist used the cyanotype process to capture both sides of the book’s page in a set of contact negatives. Pluta is interested in the different ways that making a contact negative with cyanotype creates a unique image that is not reproducible in the same way again. The process harnesses sunlight as an exposing device and enables the artist to engage with the climatic conditions inherent in the source imagery and with the scientific origins of the source text.

Pluta then cuts, collages, scans and enlarges the cyanotype to create two merged images. She works from the contact negatives to further complicate the image plane embracing the vertical tears that occurred through the process of physically superimposing one image onto another, implying a sense of spatial and temporal rupture. While some of the text is decipherable, other parts undulate away and become blurry as a result of the cyanotype process.

This work echoes Pluta’s interests in drawing on and repurposing reference materials such as outdated atlases and pictorial dictionaries to reconsider navigation and land demarcation systems, creating works that query the concept of territory and deep time. She employs imagery, video and re-purposed ephemera that speak to present-day questions about impermanence, belonging, the flows of migration and her personal narrative in relation to place.

izabelapluta.net
@izabelapluta__studio

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Izabela Pluta is a Polish-born, Australian artist living and working between the lands of the Awabakal and Worimi in Awabakal country (Newcastle) and the lands of the Bidjigal and Gadigal (Sydney). Pluta’s practice spans photography and installation. Her way of working between numerous photographic materials and surfaces re-conceptualises the function of images by adopting conflating languages of photography to explore the nuances they embody as physical objects. Pluta has exhibited widely throughout Australia and this year presented her first European solo exhibition, Variable depth, shallow water, at Spazju Kreattiv, Malta’s National Centre for Creativity. In 2019 Pluta was awarded the Perimeter Small Book Prize that led to her debut artist book, Figures of slippage and oscillation (Perimeter Books). She was also commissioned to create a significant new work, Apparent distance, by the Art Gallery of New South Wales for The National 2019: new Australia art. In 2018 Pluta was a finalist in the MAMA Foundation National Photography Award and the inaugural artist for the Marrgu Residency at Durrmu Arts Aboriginal Corporation in Peppimenarti. Pluta presented work in Form N-X00 at the US Pavilion at the 2018 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). She has held solo exhibitions at The Australian Centre for Photography (2018); Artspace, Sydney (2017, 2006); 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 also undertaken residencies in Tokyo, Barcelona, Paris, Belfast and Beijing, and at International Art Space (IASKA) in Kellerberrin, Western Australia. The artist completed her doctorate in visual arts at the University of Wollongong in 2017.

Izabela Pluta is represented by Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert, Sydney.