PROGRAMS AND EVENTS

Enter a world of fractured maps, oceanic movement and unstable systems of orientation with Izabela Pluta’s Cavitation.

Presented at The Lock-Up from 25 September 2026 to 31 January 2027, the exhibition brings sculpture, photography, moving image, tapestry and sound into dialogue, exploring how tides, pressure and migration shape our world and our lives. During Newcastle’s New Annual 2026 festival (25 September to 4 October), Cavitation extends beyond the gallery through Cavitation: Breathing Ocean, a temporary interactive floating installation at the Newcastle Canoe Pool.

ABOUT THE PROJECT

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.

CAVITATION

The exhibition centres on two distant but resonant sites: the Muloobinba/Newcastle coastline and Canoe Pool on Awabakal/Worimi Country, and the Baltic waterways surrounding Szczecin, Poland.

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.

A major new tapestry created with the Australian Tapestry Workshop anchors the exhibition, incorporating spectrographic solar data from 11 May 1986—Pluta’s departure from Poland—rendered through cyanotype-dyed threads exposed to sunlight forty years later. Elsewhere, collaborations with scientists using echo-sounding technology translate seabed and oceanic data into immersive sonic imagery, extending the practice of photography beyond the visible.

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.

CAVITATION: BREATHING OCEAN

This attention to oceanic movement extends to Cavitation: Breathing Ocean, a major public installation of marine floats gathered from Far North Queensland, on the lands of the Dingaal people. Carried across vast distances by intersecting currents before washing ashore, each float is a physical record of oceanic circulation and global drift. Assembled into a temporary constellation, drift matter forms an alternative cartography shaped not by borders, but by the movements of water, tracing entangled routes of ecology, trade and migration.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Cavitation and Cavitation: Breathing Ocean are major commissions initiated and led by The Lock-Up, Newcastle, and presented in partnership with New Annual 2026. 

Izabela Pluta has been awarded a Creative Australia Visual Arts Major Commission grant through the international co-commissioning partnership of The Lock-Up and TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art, Poland. 

The Lock-Up and this project are supported by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body, Create NSW, and New Annual 2026. 

Collaborators and project partners include the Australian Tapestry Workshop, Adam Hulbert; sound artist, composer, researcher and performer, cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis, Ocean Seagull, Tangaroa Blue Foundation, the Institute of Oceanology, Plastic Collective Foundation, Polish Academy of Sciences, Hunter Gatherer Network, Event Engineering, Heritage Stoneworks at the NSW Department of Planning, Clyde Street Precinct, Housing and Infrastructure, UNSW Art & Design, and AX Interactive. 

Izabela Pluta is represented by Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert. 

Cavitation and Cavitation: Breathing Ocean form 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.