Cavitation: Breathing Ocean

Izabela Pluta brings Cavitation: Breathing Ocean to the Newcastle Canoe Pool from 25 September to 4 October, as part of New Annual 2026. It's an interactive floating installation made of sea floats that Pluta collected from coastlines in Far North Queensland, on the lands of the Dingaal people. They drift and shift with the tide, and you're invited to swim right alongside them.

Pluta was born in Poland and lives here in Newcastle, and she draws on her experience as a political refugee and her connection to water as a swimmer and diver. The Canoe Pool itself has a bit of local history: a concrete relief map of the world there was broken apart by a storm in the 1970s, its rubble dumped in the harbour and said to have fed local myths of global movement. Pluta casts the pool's fractured edges and records underwater acoustics while swimming. In Szczecin, she collaborated with scientists at the Institute of Oceanology of the Polish Academy of Sciences to translate seabed, bubbles and anthropogenic noise into acoustic images.

Accompanying the installation is a spoken-word sound work written and voiced by Astrida Neimanis. The whole thing was developed as an international co-commission with TRAFO Centre for Contemporary Art in Poland, and Pluta was awarded a Creative Australia Visual Arts Major Commission grant for the work.

Entry is free. The installation is open Monday to Saturday from 10am to 4pm and Sunday from 10am to 2pm, at the Newcastle Canoe Pool, 30 Shortland Esplanade, Newcastle East.