Cavitation unfolds across water, sound and fractured cartographies, examining how systems of orientation fail under pressure, repetition and displacement. For Izabela Pluta, place is always relational–through movement, migration and encounter. As a child, Pluta left Poland in 1986. This departure marked a formative moment in the artist’s life, reflected throughout Cavitation as a tectonic shift that reorganised geographies and belonging. Rather than a biographical account, the project approaches mapping through notions of erasure and containment that attempt to fix land and water through fixed coordinates.

Developed as a co-commission between partnering institutions in Australia and Poland, Cavitation moves between the port towns of Newcastle and Szczecin. At the Newcastle Canoe Pool, a once-legible concrete relief map of the world was broken apart by a storm in the 1970s. Its rubble was removed and dumped in the harbour, contributing to local myths of the movement of people and materials from around the globe. By casting the pool’s fractured edges and recording underwater acoustics while swimming, Pluta explores the Canoe Pool’s conditions of loss, erosion, and discard. In the Baltic context in Szczecin, Pluta has collaborated with scientists at the Institute of Oceanology PAN in Sopot, using echo-sounders to translate seabed, bubbles and anthropogenic noise into acoustic images.

Circling back to the Pluta family’s migration, the artist has created a major tapestry in collaboration with the Australian Tapestry Workshop, incorporating spectrographic solar data from 11 May 1986, re-scaling geographical motions at an interplanetary scale. Using thread dyed using a unique process of cyanotype, the tapestry has been coloured by registering sunlight in Warsaw, forty years after her childhood departure from Poland.

Across photography, sculpture, sound, moving image and textile, Cavitation presents a constellation of material forms to create sensory encounters and bodily echoes of oceanic movements and planetary orbits, where water becomes both atmospheric field and temporal force.

The project has been awarded a Creative Australia Major Commission grant and is supported by Create NSW and the City of Newcastle.

This exhibition forms part of The Lock-Up’s 2026 curatorial season, A Call Across the Universe. Through sound, movement, image and encounter, artists and audiences are invited to tune in to new frequencies of understanding and exchange.