Dr Izabela Pluta

Izabela Pluta is an artist and academic with an interest in expanded photographic practice. She completed her undergraduate studies in Fine Art at The University of Newcastle (2002), an MFA at UNSW Art & Design (2009) and has a PhD from the School of the Arts, English and Media at The University of Wollongong (2017).  

Pluta has exhibited widely in Australia. She has undertaken residencies including the inaugural Marrgu Residency at Durrmu Arts Aboriginal Cooperative in Peppimenarti, Northern Territory; Air 3331 Chiyoda, Tokyo; the Australia Council for the Arts Studio in Barcelona; the Cite des Arts International in Paris; The Art and Design Research Institute, University of Ulster in Belfast; Red Gate Gallery in Beijing; and International Art Space Kellerberrin. Grants and awards include from Creative Australia; The Qantas Foundation Contemporary Art Award; the Freedman Foundation Traveling Scholarship for Emerging Artists and the Ian Potter Cultural Grant. A major exhibition of her work was held at UTS Gallery Sydney, titled Blue Distance, in 2014, and in 2019,  Pluta was commissioned by the Art Gallery of New South Wales to create a significant new work for 'The National 2019: new Australian art' exhibition. in 2024 was curated into the survey exhibition “Śliczna jest młodość naszego wieku. Foto-albumy 1850-1950” (2023) at the Museum of Warsaw. Other significant museum exhibitions include “Blue Assembly: Oceanic Thinking” at The University of Queensland Art Museum (2022) and her solo presentation of ‘Variable Depth, Shallow Water’ at the Spazju Kreattiv, Malta (2021); and ‘Figures of slippage and oscillation’ at Artspace Sydney (2018). 

In 2012 Pluta recieved a Short Term Mobility Grant (Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations) for a two-week intensive studio project Photomedia: site and context which provided participating students a unique opportunity to develop artwork using the potential of expanded photographic and installation practices in response to the historical and politically loaded Gdańsk shipyard on the Baltic Sea in Poland as part of their Bachelor of Fine Art coursework program. http://gdanskproject.wordpress.com/

Pluta is an artist whose practice has developed a unique visual language of spatial and representational means to signal a different modality of vision. Her work explores the intersection of photography with concepts of time and memory, and questions of place. Conceptually anchored in the effects of globalisation and her own personal experience as a migrant to Australia, Pluta’s creative pursuit seeks to articulate a fluid mode of moving through and being in the world. 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 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, her sustained meditations on the embodied experience of place have led her to explore underwater diving sites such as the recently collapsed geological structure Dwejra Azure Window in Gozo, a small island off Malta, and the mythologised underwater stone structures off the coast of Yonaguni Island, Okinawa, Japan. Pluta’s 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 a unique ledgers of transience.

More details about recent projects: www.izabelapluta.net