'ver-sur-mer' photographs and prints by Izabela Pluta

Returning to Newcastle, her creative origin, Izabela Pluta is presenting a new body of work at the Podspace Gallery. The project, Ver-sur-Mer, was made in response to a specific site in the north of France and developed during a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts studio in Paris in 2008.   Pluta's minimal lino prints and seductive photographs depict seemingly unused, abandoned, or forgotten places. Her poignant imagery visually investigates how an empty site may evoke a longing for a place: how sites of redundant urban landscapes invoke an interstitial fissured space; how images void of human presence become distant but at the same time seem familiar, provoking us to feel a longing for what is no longer there.   By exploring the notion of place and one’s relationship to it, Pluta continues to return to a reflection on the desire for, and loss of, one's history and the imagined 'home' in our reality.   Izabela Pluta was born in Warsaw, Poland, and migrated to Australia in 1987. She completed her Degree in Fine Arts at The University of Newcastle and presently is a research candidate in a Master of Fine Arts at The College of Fine Arts, UNSW. In 2003–2005 she helped establish and was a co-Director of the Newcastle Artist Run Initiative, Rocketart. Pluta lectures in photography at the National Art School, COFA, UNSW and Sydney College of the Arts. She is currently based in Sydney.

Opening Night Thursday 14th May 6-8pm Exhibition dates Wednesday 13th May – Saturday 30th May Gallery hours Wednesday – Saturday 12 – 5pm

Media enquires  Johanna Trainor 0408283680  3/231 King St (1st floor) Newcastle. podspace@octapod.org  www.octapod.org