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 three Australia Council for the Arts grants; The Qantas Foundation Contemporary Art Award; the Freedman Foundation Traveling Scholarship for Emerging Artists and the Ian Potter Cultural Grant. In 2012 she was commissioned to complete a major public art work for the City of Melbourne. The two‐part billboard was installed on the CitiPower Station in 2013. 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 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's research explores the connection between the philosophical terrain of place, nostalgia and diaspora, and the lure of her personal history (Polish/Australian) to make this enquiry. She embraces photography as a way of interpreting and re-conceptualising the function that images have in the present. Her studio practice adopts conflating languages of photography and the nuances they embody as physical objects. 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 ideas have led her to using a discursive photographic vocabulary as a purveyor of temporality, mutability and the impermanence of places. A site that has recently explored is the archaeologically disputed underwater rock formation that lies at the intersection of the Pacific Ocean and the East China Sea, near the Western most island of Japan.  Pluta mediates on images with all their potential connections all at once, questioning how things from one place fit into another.

More details about recent projects: www.izabelapluta.net