OCTOBER 2025 RELEASE
SPECIAL EDITION
Perimeter Editions and the artist are producing a special edition of 25 copies, which include a unique signed and editioned lumen print. This limited-edition print derives from a close detail of Light ledger, Pluta’s suspended installation of exposed and fixed photographic paper rolls at Heide Modern. Produced as a contact print from documentation of the installation, the work extends the iterative logic of Lumina – where light itself functions as both image and process – into a distilled and tactile form. The edition holds the memory of the original installation while enacting a further translation across materials and scales.
Afterimage (light ledger)
Chemically fixed lumen (unique)
25.4 x 20.3 cm
Shown in the last image
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The work of Izabela Pluta may enlist the optical, chemical, and technical processes of the camera and darkroom as its central pillar, but to describe her practice in terms of photography would seem insufficient. Over a career stretching the best part of two decades, the Polish-born Australian-based artist has forged a rigorous body of work that critically excavates the underpinnings of the photographic process, its modes of presentation, its fallibilities, and its broader implications. Her work is expressly photographic, but its bearings stretch far beyond the lens.
Lumina: The Photic Atlas – Pluta’s third book for Perimeter Editions – works to map and expand upon the artist’s site-responsive project, Lumina, at Heide Museum of Modern Art in Melbourne, which explores the intersection of photography with concepts of time, memory, notions of impermanence, and questions of place. Made over the course of a year, and aligned with each change of season, Pluta worked in situ with curator Melissa Keys at Heide Modern, exposing lengths of silver gelatin photographic paper to the changing natural light. Laid out across the terrazzo floor, the artist used the modernist building as a type of camera and an unwitting collaborator, registering subtle shifts of shadows and streams of light as they passed through the glass walls and windows. Other similarly unconventional approaches to recording and spatial intervention unfold throughout the former home, engaging the senses and drawing our eye to things often unseen. Extending from the exhibition, the book takes on the role of a compendium or workbook, gathering the peripheral and actual processes of the project. In this way, it functions both as a continuation of the exhibition and a critical ledger of its conditions of possibility.
Featuring essays by Melissa Keys and Witold Kanicki, alongside creative texts by critical art and poetry collective Snack Syndicate (Andrew Books and Astrid Lorange), the book also features photographs and video stills depicting Pluta’s childhood home in Warsaw, Poland, the interior of which was gutted and stripped back by its current owner, with tree stumps marking the places where conifer trees once flourished in the yard. These images forensically map out this personally significant place that still holds the patina of her family’s presence. In direct contrast to the fixity associated with the photographic image as a record of a moment in time, Pluta’s fieldwork methodology reveals a dynamic sense of continuous unfolding and entropy, articulating a fluid mode of moving through and being in the world.
192 pages, 16.8 x 23.8 cm, OTA bind, softcover with flaps, Perimeter Editions (Naarm / Melbourne).