Izabela Pluta Lumina

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.