Steven Rendall: What are the influences (political, social, artistic, cultural, historical etc.) that are essential to you and in what ways they have informed your practice?

Izabela Pluta: We as cultures seem ever more transient, moving back and forth between places. As a first generation migrant, I am interested in investigating this state of flux. The intermediate, indeterminate zone of existence between old homeland and new home. The attachment and nostalgia for the past, brought and appropriated through physical, commonly domestic spaces, in the present. There is a transportation of materiality through memory into current contexts, away from its origin, resulting in an inevitable intervention with a new aesthetic. The moment is frozen and taken at departure from the homeland; time, place, feeling and sensual experience are encapsulated and re-enacted through the embodiment of spaces in a new home(land). The migrant moves through the new world, carrying with them a fictitious memory, one that over time has been altered by time itself, transformed into something that conjures a nostalgic, possibly false, sense of place and belonging. My work explores the function of memory in social, philosophical, and personal realms. It draws parallels between my Polish background and the nature of memory and recollection. I am interested in the memory-image and its relationship to the imagination, where reality, as it is recorded, archived and revisited, is then blurred.

SR: In what ways have you extended your practice in realising this exhibition? What were the particular approaches and/or processes that you used to make the work at West Space?

IP: I am very interested at the moment in working with photographic wallpaper, where the images I make are reproduced in this medium. I investigate the conjuring of place through physicality by exploring further the materiality of photographic wallpaper and using my work as a mediator for these conceptual ideas.

SR: Why did you want to exhibit your work at West Space?

IP: I really support what West Space does as a gallery, and wanted to show the work to the audience it attracts. The space itself and positioning in of walls in Gallery One was an idea space for the work.

SR: Now that the exhibition is installed do you have any comments or criticisms (negative or positive) about your exhibition?

IP: It was a very tricky decision to make about the use of fluro/tungsten lights! it took about an hour to finally decide! In the end, fluros won. I am pleased, it provides the space with a coolness and distance that perhaps that reiterates the ideas in the work. Although the tungsten light is more magical and poetic, it seemed to contrive the installation to become something more cinematic and staged.

SR: Are there any projects or exhibitions that you are currently working on?

IP: I am currently getting new work together for a solo show at Flinders Street Gallery in Sydney, and a group show in Melbourne, at Sutton Gallery's project space. The main project at the moment is my MFA research, in preparation for a large body of work that will be made in Paris next year, while I am at the Cite studios in April-June.

SR: Where and when can people see your work?

IP: My baggage ain't all heavy, curated by Shelley McSpedden, Sutton Gallery's Warehouse 230 Young St Fitzroy, opening Friday 30th November 6pm - 15 December 2007. A solo show at Flinders Street Gallery, which will open late Jan/early Feb (dates tbc), and a group show An Ideal for Living, curated by Simon Gregg, at Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts St Kilda 13 March – 13 April 2008. I have details of projects coming up on my site www.izabelapluta.net

Link to Izabela Pluta's exhibition home(land) held at West Space 9th November - 1st December 2007.