Cavitation : Izabela Pluta
"Cavitation moves between the intimate and the planetary, trying to connect personal histories to larger oceanic and atmospheric systems”.
—Izabela Pluta
Enter a world of fractured maps, oceanic movement, and unstable systems of orientation with Izabela Pluta’s Cavitation. This large-scale, multi-venue exhibition unfolds across The Lock-Up and the Canoe Pool, bringing together sculpture, photography, moving image, tapestry and sound to explore how tides, pressure, and migration shape our world and lives.
Presented across The Lock-Up and Newcastle's Canoe Pool, this large-scale project unfolds through two connected experiences: Cavitation, an exhibition at The Lock-Up, and Cavitation: Breathing Ocean, an interactive floating installation on the water. Together, they bring sculpture, photography, moving image, tapestry and sound into dialogue, exploring how tides, pressure, and migration shape our world and our lives.
Audiences can engage with the project through a program of free and ticketed artist talks, workshops, hand-on making sessions, poetry, breathwork and meditation presented across both sites. Follow the public art trail between Cavitation at The Lock-Up and Cavitation: Breathing Ocean at the Canoe Pool, encountering different ways of experiencing the work along the way.
For artist Izabela Pluta, place is never fixed, but continually formed through memory, encounter and lived experience. Her childhood migration from Poland to Australia as a political refugee resonates throughout the project, surfacing in ideas of drift, distance and reorientation. Across both the exhibition and pool installation, shifting currents—both literal and metaphorical—unsettle familiar coordinates, inviting audiences to navigate a world in flux where bodies, landscapes and histories are in constant motion.
Izabela Pluta, a Newcastle-based, internationally recognised artist, developed this impactful and timely body of work as part of a major international co-commission with TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art, Poland, and several national and international production partners, including Australian Tapestry Workshop and the Institute of Oceanology of Polish Academy of Sciences.
THE LOCK-UP PROGRAMS
For more information on the programs accompanying Cavitation and Cavitation: Breathing Ocean, please visit The Lock-Up website.
SENSORY & CONTENT WARNING
Suitable for all ages. The exhibition at The Lock-Up may contain flashing lights.
ACCESSIBILITY
The Lock-Up offers wheelchair access at the main entrance, a unisex accessible toilet, and designated accessible street parking. Seating is available, however, if you require a seat and there isn’t one available, please let a staff member know. The Canoe Pool offers wheelchair access at the main entrance, accessible toilets, and designated accessible street parking. Limited public seating is available.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Izabela Pluta is a Polish-born, Australian-based artist working across photography, moving image, installation and sculpture. Over the past two decades, she has developed a critically acclaimed, expanded photographic language that explores how light, pressure, duration and environmental conditions shape bodies, surfaces and systems of perception. Her work pushes the limits of photography as both medium and method, treating images not as fixed representations, but as accumulations of contact, erosion, movement and time.
Pluta’s multifaceted practice draws on embodied fieldwork, personal and public archives, oceanic cartography and 20th-century geographic publications. Diving and oceanic environments are central to her work, allowing perception to shift beyond our everyday points of orientation. Through fragmentation and reconfiguration, her works challenge linear narratives of history, migration and record-keeping and question how images and systems of mapping attempt to stabilise the world around us.
Pluta is particularly interested in the relationship between bodies and planetary systems—how tides, pressure, vibration, atmosphere and environmental change act upon both materials and lived experience. Her projects frequently unfold across immersive, site-responsive installations where photography extends into sculptural and spatial form. Attuned to the complexity of an image’s materiality, Pluta imbues other mediums with a distinctly photographic way of thinking, creating sensory environments that move between the intimate, geological and oceanic.
Pluta lives and works on Awabakal and Worimi Country in Newcastle/Muloobinba, Australia.
Image credit: Izabela Pluta, 'Floating fissure', 2020. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Cavitation and Cavitation: Breathing Ocean are major commissions initiated and led by The Lock-Up, Newcastle, presented in partnership with New Annual 2026. Izabela Pluta has been awarded a Creative Australia Visual Art Major Commission grant through the international co-commissioning partnership of The Lock-Up and TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art, Poland.
The Lock-Up and the project are supported by Creative Australia, Create NSW and New Annual 2026.
Collaborators and project partners include the Australian Tapestry Workshop, Adam Hulbert: sound artist, composer, researcher and performer, Astrida Neimanis, Ocean Seagull, Institute of Oceanology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Hunter Gatherer Network, Event Engineering, Heritage Stoneworks at the NSW Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure and AX Interactive.
Izabela Pluta is represented by Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert.
Presented across The Lock-Up and Newcastle's Canoe Pool, this large-scale project unfolds through two connected experiences: Cavitation, an exhibition at The Lock-Up, and Cavitation: Breathing Ocean, an interactive floating installation on the water. Together, they bring sculpture, photography, moving image, tapestry and sound into dialogue, exploring how tides, pressure, and migration shape our world and our lives.
Audiences can engage with the project through a program of free and ticketed artist talks, workshops, hand-on making sessions, poetry, breathwork and meditation presented across both sites. Follow the public art trail between Cavitation at The Lock-Up and Cavitation: Breathing Ocean at the Canoe Pool, encountering different ways of experiencing the work along the way.
For artist Izabela Pluta, place is never fixed, but continually formed through memory, encounter and lived experience. Her childhood migration from Poland to Australia as a political refugee resonates throughout the project, surfacing in ideas of drift, distance and reorientation. Across both the exhibition and pool installation, shifting currents—both literal and metaphorical—unsettle familiar coordinates, inviting audiences to navigate a world in flux where bodies, landscapes and histories are in constant motion.
Izabela Pluta, a Newcastle-based, internationally recognised artist, developed this impactful and timely body of work as part of a major international co-commission with TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art, Poland, and several national and international production partners, including Australian Tapestry Workshop and the Institute of Oceanology of Polish Academy of Sciences.
THE LOCK-UP PROGRAMS
For more information on the programs accompanying Cavitation and Cavitation: Breathing Ocean, please visit The Lock-Up website.
SENSORY & CONTENT WARNING
Suitable for all ages. The exhibition at The Lock-Up may contain flashing lights.
ACCESSIBILITY
The Lock-Up offers wheelchair access at the main entrance, a unisex accessible toilet, and designated accessible street parking. Seating is available, however, if you require a seat and there isn’t one available, please let a staff member know. The Canoe Pool offers wheelchair access at the main entrance, accessible toilets, and designated accessible street parking. Limited public seating is available.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Izabela Pluta is a Polish-born, Australian-based artist working across photography, moving image, installation and sculpture. Over the past two decades, she has developed a critically acclaimed, expanded photographic language that explores how light, pressure, duration and environmental conditions shape bodies, surfaces and systems of perception. Her work pushes the limits of photography as both medium and method, treating images not as fixed representations, but as accumulations of contact, erosion, movement and time.
Pluta’s multifaceted practice draws on embodied fieldwork, personal and public archives, oceanic cartography and 20th-century geographic publications. Diving and oceanic environments are central to her work, allowing perception to shift beyond our everyday points of orientation. Through fragmentation and reconfiguration, her works challenge linear narratives of history, migration and record-keeping and question how images and systems of mapping attempt to stabilise the world around us.
Pluta is particularly interested in the relationship between bodies and planetary systems—how tides, pressure, vibration, atmosphere and environmental change act upon both materials and lived experience. Her projects frequently unfold across immersive, site-responsive installations where photography extends into sculptural and spatial form. Attuned to the complexity of an image’s materiality, Pluta imbues other mediums with a distinctly photographic way of thinking, creating sensory environments that move between the intimate, geological and oceanic.
Pluta lives and works on Awabakal and Worimi Country in Newcastle/Muloobinba, Australia.
Image credit: Izabela Pluta, 'Floating fissure', 2020. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Cavitation and Cavitation: Breathing Ocean are major commissions initiated and led by The Lock-Up, Newcastle, presented in partnership with New Annual 2026. Izabela Pluta has been awarded a Creative Australia Visual Art Major Commission grant through the international co-commissioning partnership of The Lock-Up and TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art, Poland.
The Lock-Up and the project are supported by Creative Australia, Create NSW and New Annual 2026.
Collaborators and project partners include the Australian Tapestry Workshop, Adam Hulbert: sound artist, composer, researcher and performer, Astrida Neimanis, Ocean Seagull, Institute of Oceanology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Hunter Gatherer Network, Event Engineering, Heritage Stoneworks at the NSW Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure and AX Interactive.
Izabela Pluta is represented by Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert.
