Izabela Pluta - Abstruse terms and general uncertainties (Ocean current 2, Deep, Mirage)

Edition of 3, AP 2 of 2

Izabela Pluta’s embraces expanded forms of photography to explore ideas of becoming ‘untethered’ and how bodies of water might invite new forms of relation. This has included deep water diving and making work in response to underwater rock formations and collapsed sea stacks. Her series Abstruse terms and general uncertainties examines the visual, material and conceptual nuances of image-making to explore processual phenomena and our engagement ecologies of relation and concepts of place. Created in response to an underwater rock formation that lies off the coast of the western most island of Japan - where the Pacific Ocean and the East China Sea meet - Pluta photographically explores the allegorical potential of this ‘anomaly’ and its ability to prompt archaeologists and scientists to speculate on whether it is a naturally sunken form or a cultural artefact. Amongst other found ‘artefacts’, or flotsam, the artist brings into focus navigational buoys scattered and wedged between volcanic rock formations. These spherical shapes, normally anchored, have drifted with ocean currents and serendipitously fallen between the enclaves along the shoreline. Pluta is interested photographic processes associated with anomalies, chance and coincidence. Conceptually anchored in the flows of globalisation and informed by her passage as a migrant to Australia, she seeks to articulate her experience moving through, and being in, the world. This work sits within her broader exploration around temporality, mutability and the impermanence of places – exploring the ocean as a site of change.