Izabela Pluta

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Dr Izabela Pluta (born 1979, Poland) is a Polish-born, Australian artist.. Pluta has has exhibited both nationally and internationally and has been the recipient of numerous awards such as the Qantas Foundation Encouragement of Australian Contemporary Art Award and The Ian Potter Cultural Trust Grant and has been a finalist in the Bowness Photography Award (2017, 2018, 2020) and in 2018 was shortlisted for the MAMA Foundation National Photographic Award. In 2019, Pluta released her debut artist book, Figures of Slippage and Oscillation alongside her work, Apparent distance, that was commissioned by The Art Gallery of New South Wales for The National: New Australian Art. Pluta completed her Master of Fine Arts at UNSW Art & Design and went on to write her PhD thesis entitled Allegories of Diaspora: Gleaning the residues of spatial and temporal misalignments at The University of Wollongong and is now a senior lecturer at The University of New South Wales. Her thesis "examines contemporary thinking on and definitions of place and the phenomenon of globalisation" as informed by Pluta's own experience as a migrant to Australia - a conceptual anchor that has been retained in Pluta's practice ongoing.

Pluta is represented by Gallery Sally Dan Cuthbert in Sydney.

Life and Work

In 1986, at age six, Pluta left Poland for West Germany with her family and subsequently migrated to Australia in 1987. She grew up in Newcastle and studied art at The University of Newcastle from 1996 to 2002 and went on to complete her Masters of Fine Arts between 2007 and 2009 and then in 2017 she completed her thesis.

In 2004 Pluta undertook a residency at Art Space Kellerberrin (IASKA), and went on to take up international residencies at Air 3331 Chiyoda (Tokyo), the Australia Council for the Arts Studio(Barcelona), the Cite des Arts International (Paris), The Art and Design Research Institute at the University of Ulster, Belfast and Red Gate Gallery, Beijing.

In 2018, she undertook the inaugural Marrgu Residency in Peppimenarti, five hours south west of Darwin. Pluta and her family spent time with the people of the Ngan’gikurrunggurr language group at the Durrmu Arts Aboriginal Corporation engaging in an organic exchange and cross-cultural dialogue with local artists and community guided by artist Regina Pilawuk Wilson.

Between 2018 and 2021, Pluta practiced from the Shirlow St Studios in Marrickville, alongside Australian artists Cybel Cox, David Griggs, Fernando de Campo, Mason Kimber, Stevie Fieldsend, Tim Silver and Will Cooke. Now, she lives and works between the lands of the Awabakal and Worimi in Awabakal Country (Newcastle) and the lands of the Bidjigal and Gadigal (Sydney).

Ineke Dane, Australian curator and writer, states: “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”. Poet, novelist, literary editor and essayist, Lisa Gorton, explains that there is "a strange resistance in Pluta’s own photographs, with their mesmerising surfaces, their effect of disquiet. Wallpapers, murals, tricks of scale; photographs of buildings closed in plastic, lost objects, abandoned settlements, the edges of famous places, unpeopled, unidentified – Pluta’s work refuses to treat place as a souvenir or relic. It is often as though you can see, in her photographs, place as it is to itself – simultaneous, unreachable, abandoned, perpetually in the front of light."

As well as these public recognitions by Dane and Gorton, Pluta has featured in national and international publications such as The Malta Art Paper, Artist Profile, Artlink, Australian Art Collector and Vault.

Selected Work Detail

Figures of slippage and oscillation (2018)

Figures of slippage and oscillation (2018) consists of 60 paper negatives that were made by employing a camera-less process of contact printing full-page relief maps from three different editions of atlas' - "what eventuates is a visual collapse of states, territories and geographical names that blurs the distinction between the land masses, their coordinates and the political entities that govern them". The process fuses together two maps that are originally printed on both sides of the page while light passes through the paper.

Apparent distance (2019)

This work responds to the archaeologically disputed underwater rock formation, The Yonaguni Monument, that lies at the intersection of the Pacific Ocean and the East China Sea, near the Western most island of Japan. Pluta spent time studying and exploring this monument in close proximity, guided by local experts. The work was commissioned by the Art Gallery of New South Wales for The National 2019: New Australian Art exhibition and involved a pictorial wall covering across the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s Entrance Court. The wall covering is comprised of dye sublimation prints of the on large scale canvas that both occupy the wall and appear like they are falling off its surface. The work "pictorially and spatially explores the variables around the brightness of an object – its luminosity and shifting distance from the observer – of uncertainty and precarity".

Variable depth, shallow water (2021) 

Variable depth, shallow water (2021), was exhibited in Pluta’s solo exhibition at Spazju Kreattiv - Malta’s National Centre for Creativity. The work is comprised of small photographs printed on aluminium, traditional darkroom prints and photographs of aerial footage filmed by a drone. The installation was influenced by corrupted film data that the artist filmed in Malta using a drone that she lost at sea during the work’s making. The drone crashed into the cliff face from which the sea arch of Dwejra originally fell away two years earlier. Her camera sunk amidst the debris of the rocks but was retrieved by local divers and returned to the artist in Australia on the memory card several weeks later. Variable depth, shallow water is a response to this misadventure - the lost drone, the loss of a geological form, the loss of perception, orientation and of clarity. "Inspired by Dwerja, the concept of deep time, the instantaneous moment of change, and informed by her own passage as a migrant to Australia, the work investigates the uncertainty of location"

List of Recent Solo Exhibitions

2021 - Variable depth, shallow water, Spazju Kreattiv, Valletta, Malta

2020 - Measure of Refraction, Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert, Sydney

2019  Reversal, The Glasshouse Regional Gallery, Port Macquarie

2018 - Figures of slippage and oscillation, Artspace, Sydney

2014 - Blue Distance, UTS Gallery, Sydney

2012 - Unset Typologies, a public artwork commissioned by the City of Melbourne.

2012 - Reservoir, Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale

2011 - Gestures of landscape, Queensland Centre for Photography, Brisbane

2011 - displaced images of distant objects, Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne

2010 - Sailing for the abyss, Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne

2010 - 24 HR Art, Darwin

2009 - Gestures of the landscape, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Perth

2009 - In (and against) time, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Canberra

List of Selected Group Exhibitions

2021 - Oceans from Here, Blue Mountains Cultural Centre, Blue Mountains

2021 - Reconfigured/Rediscovered, Town Hall Gallery, PHOTO 2021, International Festival  of Photography, Melbourne

2021 - The National 2019: New Australian Art, The Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney

2019 - Civilization: the way we live now, The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

2018 - Geography of space, archeology of time, The Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney

2018 - Form N-X00, US Pavilion at the Biennale Architettura, Venice, Italy (collaboration with Other Architects)

2016 - Watching Clouds Pass the Moon, The Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery, Sydney

2016 - Timelapse, Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale

2015 - Mildura Palimpsest Biennale #10, Mildura

2015 - Out of Quarantine, Manly Art Gallery and Museum, Manly

2015 - You Can't Get There From Here, 55 Sydenham Rd, Sydney

2014 - Through the lens, Horsham Regional Gallery, Horsham

2014 - View from a window, Westspace, Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne

2008 - An ideal for living, Linden Contemporary Arts Centre, Melbourne

Further Reading

"Capturing the unreality of visual perception". Times of Malta. Retrieved 2021-07-05.

"VIDEO: Pull Focus with Izabela Pluta". Art Collector Magazine. 2020-09-15. Retrieved 2021-07-05.

"Photo Essay; Izabela Pluta", (November-January 2020-202). Vault - Australasian Art And Culture, Issue 32, p96-99. Retrieved 2021-07-04.

31606639. "Artpaper. Issue #10". Issuu. Retrieved 2021-07-05.

"Izabela Pluta". Artist Profile. 2020-09-03. Retrieved 2021-07-05.

Simon., Gregg, (2011). New romantics: darkness and light in Australian art. Australian Scholarly Pub. ISBN 978-1-921509-91-9. OCLC 654583341.

"The National 2019: New Australian Art". Artlink Magazine. Retrieved 2021-07-04.

"The National review – contemporary art from the uncanny to the inviting". the Guardian. 2019-03-29. Retrieved 2021-07-04.

Morris, Linda (2019-03-27). "Contemporary art's Instagram moment". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 2021-07-04.

"Geography of Space, Archaeology of Time, Izabela Pluta & Utako Shindo | Art + Australia". Retrieved 2021-07-04.

Fitzgerald, Michael (2018-10). "Notes from the darkroom", Art Monthly, Issue 311. Retrieved 2021-07-04.

"Dimensions of Citizenship | US Pavilion - La Biennale di Venezia". Archisearch. 2018-05-16. Retrieved 2021-07-04.

Barker, Craig; Conroy, Diana Wood. "Old sites, new visions: art and archaeology collide in Cyprus". The Conversation. Retrieved 2021-07-04.

Rule, Dan (2015-02-14). "Exhibition Review", The Age Spectrum, p21. Retrieved 2021-07-04.

Marjoram, Amy (2014-05-07). "Art Radar #1: Photography", Art Guide. Retrieved 2021-07-04.

Fehily, Toby (2014-06). "Agency of inanimate objects", Art Guide, p43. Retrieved 2021-07-04.

Nelson, Robert (2013-07-31). "Racks and ruin: framing decay", The Age, p50. Retrieved 2021-07-04.

Romaniuk, Olha (2012-12-10). "Rethinking the Margins", Surface Asia. Retrieved 2021-07-04.

Kohenm, Apolline (February-April 2010). "Temporary transformations", Australian Art Review, , Feb-April 2010, p72. Retrieved 2021-07-04.

Gregg, Simon (2009). "Ok with my decay: Encounters with chronology in the work of four contemporary Australian artists", ARTLINK, Vol 29, No 1, p61-63. Retrieved 2021-07-04.

Lehmann, Steffen, (2009). Back to the city: strategies for informal urban interventions: collaboration between artists and architects. Hatje Cantz. ISBN 978-3-7757-2329-9. OCLC 276566691.

Hart, Melissa (2008-03). "Domestic sublime", Art Monthly, #207, p53. Retrieved 2021-07-04.

Whamond, Ashley (2006). "Making mirrors and breaking walls", Artspace Projects, p13. Retrieved 2021-07-04.

Morrel, Timothy (2006-02). "Four Photographers", Art Collector, p251. Retrieved 2021-07-04.

McMillan, Kate (June-July 2005). "There and back", Realtime, p40. Retrieved 2021-07-04.

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