Light Ledger 2025
fixed Lumen prints on silver gelatin paper, acrylic and stainless steel
Light Beacon 2022
fixed Lumen print on silver gelatin paper
This work was created during the artist’s tenure as an Artistic Associate (2022–24) at the Powerhouse Museum, using the Survey beacon
A type of navigational device, the light beacon omits omnidirectional signals that provide points of reference, often over long distances, to triangulate positions, measure distances, and survey and chart courses through complex, difficult terrains across land and sea. In drawing on this object in her work, Pluta gestures toward the ways we orient ourselves—physically, perceptually, or even emotionally—within shifting and unstable topographies, where navigation becomes a continual act of interpretation, attunement, and adaptation.
Latent Line 2025
violet laser level, bronze, glass and undeveloped Lumen print on silver gelatin paper
In this work a violet-coloured laser passes through a prism that is nestled in a bronze cast of the artist’s own cupped hand. The glass prism has shattered, faceted sides that splinter and disperse the light, creating a feathered, multi-directional effect.
Testing the limits of photography as a fixed moment, a roll of photographic paper located within the trajectory of the beam continues to absorb light for the duration of the exhibition, becoming incrementally saturated and exposed to the point of fatigue and collapse. Through this process, light becomes both a tool of inscription and an agent of erosion, revealing the delicate interplay between preservation and impermanence.
Soft Resistance 2025
silicon putty
Pink silicone putty, mostly used for the purposes of taking impressions or creating moulds, is variously applied to surfaces throughout the exhibition space as a type of filler, plugging up fissures and fractures that appear in the gallery’s limestone walls.
Applied quickly, the lumpy application retains the traces of the artist’s fingertips and prints and is intended to draw our attention to the wear of the building as a register of time, human activity and material decay. This gesture is also an extension of Pluta’s interest in restorative care, the material traces of the past and notions of repair, preservation, and balance with the natural world.
Refracted Fold 2025
dichroic film
Arranged within the existing structures of the house, Refracted Fold is activated by and subtly registers movement of the body and the eye, revealing the ways in which we dynamically apprehend light, space and forms that surround us. Made from a material designed to regulate the intensity of sunlight as it moves through windows, this shimmering and reflective sculpture also alludes to the fleeting nature of vision and the ways in which it may be filtered, moderated and altered.
See-thru 2002
silver gelatin photograph
A small black and white photograph of a bright light and a lacy curtain enigmatically captures the entry point to a bathroom in the artist’s childhood home in Warsaw, Poland. Taken in 2002, during a return trip to her hometown, 16 years after her initial departure, the image registers as a liminal threshold, a flash of faded memory. Drawing this fleeting personal fragment into dialogue with the physical washroom of Heide Modern, she conflates two spaces associated with the body, that each in different ways act as indexes of the past.
Leaves collected from the Heide grounds are configured in the base of the shower recess echoing those that have collected naturally outside the window. Pluta is interested in the porousness and exchange between different experiences, places and touch points between notions of inside and the outside, the mind, the body and the social world we are immersed in.
Untitled (hands) 2022
bronze
The bronze hands presented here are casts of the artists own. You are invited to touch them. Over time the sculptures will patina through accumulated touch, a type of interaction and engagement that Pluta views as an unorthodox form of record keeping, a registry of fleeting moments, and connections—a gesture that also underscores the reciprocity between artist and viewer.
Surface Register 1–4 2025
UV-cured inkjet prints on glass
Pluta documented the anatomy of her family’s home in Poland on a return visit to Warsaw in 2024. Her images show the walls of the house stripped back and gutted, by the new owner. The refurbishment appears almost forensic in approach, the photographs depicting a shell or carcass of the former dwelling. In spite of the demolition and traces of old wallpaper, the wear and patina of Pluta’s former familial life still persists, the images simultaneously suggesting processes of renewal and loss.
Pluta has printed her photographs onto glass panels, so one can see through them to the limestone walls of Heide Modern. The conversation pit has also been stripped of its cushions and floor coverings, its original residents also long gone, similarly performing as a space of memory, projection and longing. Layered together these two sites suggest the way in which memories, places and experiences converge, together with the slippery, complex nature of sight and life’s mutability.
Undertone 2025
reclaimed aluminium windows
Courtesy of the Salvage Yard, Castlemaine
This assemblage is comprised of an array of different types of glass panes extracted from doors and windows in unknown buildings that have been sourced from a salvage yard. Arranged together, the different sheets work in concert with the glass balustrade to capture passing reflections of Heide’s surrounds and to draw the outside in. As light moves across their surfaces the panes filter and regulate the intensity of sunlight, transforming the view beyond Heide Modern into a fragmented composition of shifting hues. This interplay of transparency, opacity and reflection echoes the mechanics of photography—where images are inscribed by light—while also altering spatial depth and perception.
Rembertów (temporal rings) 2025
silver gelatin photographs
In early Christian symbolism conifer trees, as evergreens, were associated with eternal life. Pluta here documents the remnants of a row of conifers that once demarcated the boundary of her childhood family home in Warsaw. The growth rings of each tree remain discernible on the stump, marking out their various life spans and engendering thoughts about cycles of life and the transitory nature of all things.
Compass 2025
digital video, filmed in 2002,
Filmed at waist height, this shaky hand-held video footage was taken during the artist’s first return visit to the family home in Poland in 2002. At this time the residence continued to be the home of Pluta’s grandmother, Anna Parobek.
The recording takes us down the dimly lit hallway of the house past a series of closed doors, the camera scrutinising each of the unturned handles as we pass by. Designed to keep in the warmth, this European dwelling exists in stark contrast to Heide Modern, which has no internal doors. Constructed as a series of interlocking rooms, the layout of the modernist building allows for light to flow through its glass walls unfettered. Brought together, the contrasting architecture of these homes suggests the opening and closing of space and the entry and restriction of light, similar to the action of a shutter. Pluta’s project equally acts as a type of wayfinding composed of sensory forms of navigation, guiding our imaginations across two different hemispheres, sites, and intersections of time.
Understructure 2025
UV-cured inkjet prints on glass
Presented beneath the bench in Heide Modern’s living room space, this suite of eight inkjet prints captures the rough, unseen underside of the countertop. Indexical in nature the images do not simply point to their referent (which is directly above them) but instead act as a kind of echo or reflection, creating a dialogue between the visible and the hidden, and a disruption to the accepted observable appearance of the architecture.
Light Ledger 2025
fixed Lumen prints on silver gelatin paper, acrylic and stainless steel
For this spectral and cascading installation, Pluta presents seven lengths of fixed light-sensitive sheets of paper. Each individual sheet was exposed to conditions within the Heide Modern building for a period of one hour at a different moment over the course of a twelve-month period. Known as Lumen prints or solargrams, collectively the works subtly register the changing light and shadows over the seasons.
Placed inside one another and opening out at the base, this configuration resembles a series of tented peaks or transient living structures and is akin to a type of multi-temporal ledger or layered record of gathered time.
Izabela Pluta’s approach to photographic processes does not focus on static fixed images typically associated with camera technologies, but rather privileges dynamic, relational and experimental ways to expose places, spaces and memories and capture the passage of time.
A crack meter is an instrument designed to measure and monitor movement across surface cracks and structural joints over time. It is commonly used in industries such as civil engineering, architecture, construction, geology, and heritage conservation to monitor structural integrity and assess potential risks in buildings, bridges, dams, tunnels, and historical sites. Used over different timeframes, crack meters are capable of recording subtle shifts in width, displacement, or deformation. These measurements assist engineers and conservators to track structural stress, detect progressive failure, and determine whether intervention is necessary. In geological contexts, crack meters are also used to study the dynamics of rock formations, landslide activity, and seismic fault movements, providing data on environmental and material changes over time.
Shadow (offset) 2025
cinefoil
Shadow (offset) is comprised of a roll of heavy-duty black cinefoil that was pressed and rubbed up against the uneven textured limestone surface of the gallery wall like a frottage. Once impressions of the various textures and tiny imperfections appeared and pushed through the soft metal skin, the artist pulled the aluminium membrane away. She then created a space between the wall and the pressed form that measures the precise length of her foot, creating a direct material register that combines both her body and the site.
Cinefoil is used primarily in photography, film and theatre. Pluta wanted to ‘leverage its unique matte black, light-absorbing qualities to create a form that not only resists reflection but also absorbs surrounding light. Conceptually, cinefoil may embody qualities of concealment and silence, positioning it almost as a “void” or shadow within the space—of obscurity and absence—traditionally its purpose being to eliminate light. In my work it serves as a sculptural “cloak”, transforming light into an integral, though invisible, part of the work.’
Echo Lines 2025
silver gelatin photographs (chemically fixed Lumens)
These sheets are the first tests, or ‘transet’ exposures that Izabela Pluta made to commence this project in early 2023.They were used to ‘read’ the light in the building and were placed in the corners and bays near windows, on the floor, and in areas that she could reach. Using the sheets was akin to using a light metre, so Pluta could determine contrast and how light travels into and around the building. Together these exposures form a taxonomic study of the artist’s measured approach and were not conceived to produce an exact result. The sheets have been chemically fixed and dried but not pressed.
By choosing not to fully heat-press the fibre-based prints, Pluta aimed to ‘emphasise the natural texture and minor warping of the paper, which underscores the photograph as both image and object, with surface details contributing to a more tactile and organic viewing experience’.
Izabela Pluta: Lumina
29 March—5 October 2025
Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne
Curator: Melissa Keys
Izabela Pluta’s site-specific project Lumina explores the intersection of photography with concepts of time, memory, notions of impermanence and questions of place. To create her installation, over the course of a year and aligned with each change of season, Pluta worked in situ within Heide Modern exposing lengths of silver gelatin photographic paper to the changing natural light. Laid out across the terrazzo floor the artist used the modernist building as a type of camera and an unwitting collaborator, registering subtle shifts of shadows and streams of light as they passed through the glass walls and windows. Other similarly unconventional approaches to recording and spatial intervention unfold throughout the former home, engaging the senses and drawing our eye to things often unseen.
Pluta presents these experiments alongside photographs and a video of her childhood house in Warsaw, Poland, the interior of which was gutted and stripped back by its current owner, with tree stumps marking the places where conifer trees once flourished. These images forensically map out this personally significant place that still holds the patina of her family’s presence.
In direct contrast to the fixity associated with the photographic image as a record of a moment in time, Pluta’s fieldwork methodology reveals a dynamic sense of continuous unfolding and entropy, articulating a fluid mode of moving through and being in the world.
This project has been assisted by the School of Art Design, The University of New South Wales.
Exhibition Documentation: Christian Capurro and Clytie Meredith