Counter forces

Izabela Pluta’s practice deals with photography and the function of images, combined with a sustained exploration of the idea of ‘place’. Her works call attention to the impermanence and mutability of geographic boundaries, a subject informed by her experience as a Polish migrant and by broader considerations of the effects of globalisation on culture, politics and the environment.

Over the past decade, Pluta has drawn source material from cartographic sequences, drone footage, underwater landscapes and found travelogues, as well as her own photography. She reconfigures this material through ongoing experimentation with imaging technologies, printing on surfaces ranging from paper to metal and glass, through to textiles and tapestry. The outcomes are mysterious objects that speak to the multiplicity of our understanding of place and query the limitations of representation through the photographic medium.

Pluta’s work, Counter forces, is a portrait of the transition of Bundanon from landscape to museum at the Riversdale property. To develop this work, the artist visited Bundanon multiple times throughout the museum’s construction. On her first visit, she documented the limits of the worksite, where excavation processes met the Shoalhaven River and the hill within which the museum is now situated. She also prepared a series of clay pressings, physical negatives of the rocks that were machined and cut away to make the outer wall of the building. On subsequent visits, these fragmentary images were projected back onto the site and documented yet again.

Pluta's final work is an alternately draped and propped installation reaching more than six metres up the museum’s rear structural wall. The printed surface that makes up its sail-like body is anchored by sculptural components including bronze hands, clay pressings and long struts fabricated from repurposed timber painting easels. These objects allude to traditional taxonomies of museological display by carefully re-staging and mixing artworks with artefacts to operate in-between the hierarchies of systems of ordering. These visual strategies also give form to the cycle of positive and negative that underpins the photographic process. Through this combination of materials, Counter forces documents not only the museum as a completed entity but maps the many iterations of its development, reflecting the instances of disorder and order generated by the excavation. Operating against the logic of a single photographic representation, Pluta’s portrait shows us many readings of how the museum has come into being, and the ripple effect of its insertion into the natural landscape.

text extract from the exhibition catalogue.

This work was commissioned by Bundanon for the exhibition From impulse to action at Bundanon Art Museum.
Curated by Sophie O’Brien with Boe-lin Bastian

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body