Angela Pozzi, Founder and Artistic Director of the Washed Ashore Project

Kimberly WhiteHello and welcome to The Planetary Podcast. Today we are joined by Angela Pozzi, Founder and Artistic Director of the Washed Ashore Project. Thank you so much for joining us today, Angela.Angela PozziThank you. It’s exciting to be here.Kimberly WhiteSo Angela, can you tell us more about your work with Washed Ashore?Angela PozziWell, I’m the founder of Washed Ashore, art to save the sea, which is actually a nonprofit organization based in a little tiny town on the southern Oregon coast called Bandon, Oregon. It is an educational nonprofit where we work with volunteers to clean up beaches of plastic pollution, and then people bring all that stuff into us. We process it, turn all that stuff into educational art supplies, and we create gigantic sculptures in the forms of marine animals that are threatened by plastic pollution. Then, in order to do the work that we really want to, we exhibit our work around the country in four different traveling exhibits and try to reach as many people as we possibly can with the idea that if people see the junk that is washing up on our beaches and recognize it as things that they use every day, we will start changing people’s consumer habits. So, that’s really what we do, and we have signage to go with it. But our work is meant to be powerful and huge, and you can’t ignore it so that we can get more solutions happening to tackle the plastic pollution problem.Kimberly WhiteThat’s amazing. The artwork that you created is just larger than life and so beautiful to look at. It’s hard to believe that it’s made out of something like plastic pollution. So have you always been an artist? And can you share more about your background?Angela PozziYes, I do want to tag on to what you just said because our work is often considered and what we try for is beautiful but horrifying. Go with beautiful and horrifying, just kind of an interesting combination. So me as an artist, I was one of those few fortunate people who grew up with art surrounding me. My mom was a professional artist, and she made sure that we knew what that meant to be a professional artist. That meant she had a studio full time, and that was her job. She went to work every morning making art, and just as a painter and an exhibitor, worked in museums and galleries and sold it.My father was an arts administrator, which means he was a museum director when I was a kid, and so I got to just go into museums and galleries all the time. So I was very, very blessed with always having a place in my mother’s studio, and my parents nurtured my creativity ever since I was a baby. So I was really, really lucky, and it’s really funny. I’ve taken art lessons along the way. But really, my parents growing up at my mom’s studio and having art critiques and going to museums is really my best arts education. Although I did study it, what I realized was that I was so lucky that a lot of my friends and everybody in my public schools didn’t get it, didn’t understand how important art was as a language and how great it was. And so, I was determined to become an art teacher.So I went off to college, I got my education degree and got certified as an early childhood elementary teacher, and specialized in art. Then I ended up teaching, actually certified with art all the way through high school. So I was actually a dedicated art teacher to bring the kind of love for the arts and the importance of it to the rest of the public. For 30 years, I was an art teacher. And my mother always said, “You know, Angela, you should really be an artist,” and I’m like, “no, no, no; you guys do that, I don’t. I’m an art teacher,” When she passed away when I was age 40, I finally looked at myself and went, you know, maybe I should give it a shot. Maybe my mom had something; maybe I should give it, see what I’ve got in me. So I went to part-time teaching and started making art out of repurposed materials. I actually still have a website up called sea things art.com, and that is my earlier work, and I would go to thrift stores, and I would get stuff that, you know, were interesting looking and put them together, but I was always intrigued with the ocean. So my work always reflected coral reefs and sea creatures and made-up things, and so that really kind of led me into Washed Ashore. I started really becoming an artist in, you know, in the last 20 years, really, because I’m now 63. So yeah.Kimberly WhiteI just love your story. I think it’s so cool how you went from, you know, that background of having your parents as the art teachers for that enrichment and then being an art teacher, and then you’re obviously a very talented artist. So your mother was right.Angela PozziStill learning!Kimberly WhiteWhat inspired you to use plastics as your medium? Can you tell me a little bit more about how Washed Ashore came about?Angela PozziThat was also a very personal story. I had always come to the southern Oregon ...