Kimberly White
Hello 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 Pozzi
Thank you. It’s exciting to be here.

Kimberly White
So Angela, can you tell us more about your work with Washed Ashore?

Angela Pozzi
Well, 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.

Credit: The Washed Ashore Project

Kimberly White
That’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 Pozzi
Yes, 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.

Credit: The Washed Ashore Project

Kimberly White
I 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 Pozzi
Still learning!

Kimberly White
What inspired you to use plastics as your medium? Can you tell me a little bit more about how Washed Ashore came about?

Angela Pozzi
That was also a very personal story. I had always come to the southern Oregon coast as a child, even though we never lived here. My parents lived in Utah and then in Washington State. We would always come to Bandon, Oregon, every summer where my grandparents lived, but also where our family had a family cabin on a little lake. So I spent all my summers here. I mean, I loved it here so much that I would when I was older, I had the key to the cabin on my keychain, and I would just hold it and stare at it, going, I can get to the ocean anytime I want. Because I never lived at the ocean and so it always had a special place in my heart. I always walked to beaches when I was a kid and really felt like it was, you know, just a sacred place. I’ve known the beaches in this area for a very long time. When I was a little kid, we would find something from Japan and get really excited. I was like, oh, wow, look at this, you know, we’d run home and just like, wow, we put it up on our mantel because it was so special to find usually something plastic and you’re like ‘Wow, that’s amazing!’ Now, it’s a whole different world. So what happened was, as I was teaching, I was up in Vancouver, Washington as a full-time teacher.

The other part of my life is I was married to a wonderful artist and also art teacher, Craig Pozzi. We got married in 1980. We have a beautiful daughter, Nicola Pozzi. We were married for 25 years when he suddenly became very ill with seizures, and a whole series of events happened, where he ended up dying in 2004, and I was a mess. We were living in Vancouver. My daughter was a mess. I was a mess. It was just really traumatic. He was paralyzed the last year of his life, and I couldn’t teach. I was just disabled by the whole thing, really. So I really had to figure out how to get my life back and what my life would look like and what would be my purpose in life because I just was destroyed. So I thought I have to move to the ocean and let’s move to Bandon, Oregon, because that way I can go to the place that’s always been there for me, I can heal there. So I did, I moved to Bandon, and I walked the beaches every day, and I noticed there was like junk on the beach, but I really didn’t want to see it. I kind of walked over it. I just wanted to see beauty and heal. Until one day, it was so in my face. It had been a couple of years actually being down in Bandon making my artwork; when there we go, that’ll keep you busy, and let’s just make that happen.

My mom was also a great woman that she said you can do anything you set your mind to, and I’ve always believed that. I thought, “Okay, Angela, go, how are you gonna do that?” And my creative brain just kicked in, and I thought, okay, gotta figure it out, and here we are. I got it figured out. Then, in 2010, I started a nonprofit, and I got a show. Based on my other work that had gotten good reception, I called the same people up and said, I got a great show for you. You just have to trust me on this. It’s all made of garbage. Like what? Anyway, it worked, and I got it traveling. Now we have a thriving nonprofit, we have lots of people, over the years have worked with us, and for us, we have a powerful staff, and, and I am a professional artist with a wage now. So there you go.

Kimberly White
I think your story is so inspiring because it’s just, we should all have that attitude of, you know, when we care about something like you do the ocean, I’m gonna go save that and do anything we can to help raise awareness. I think that’s just amazing, and, you know, plastic pollution has been one of the most discussed topics among world leaders in recent years aside from climate change, which is understandable, with more than 8 million tons of plastic ending up in the oceans each year. It reaches the farthest points of the Earth from the remote corners of the Pyrenees to the Mariana Trench. It’s become so pervasive; we’re even finding it in our foods. So, you see these discarded pieces of plastic pollution on the shore. How does it go from pollution to a piece of artful awareness? Can you walk us through your creative process?

Angela Pozzi
Well, we really depend on volunteers. It’s huge. What’s interesting is Oregon is not at all known for polluted beaches. We are known for beautiful, serene, you know, picturesque beaches, and but it’s we’re part of the Asian currents that we get garbage on our beaches, like everybody else in the whole world, coming from all over the world. So we pick it up on a regular basis. We have a place on Highway 101, which is a major thoroughfare and a scenic highway, where people could just drop off bags of garbage that they pick up off the beaches anytime. And they do. We also partner with the state parks. They love us. Because they actually get excited about picking up garbage, even though it’s part of their job, they get excited and come in here and say, “Oh, I found a really cool thing that’s gonna look great on your new eagle or whatever,” So it’s been fun in that regard that we change people’s attitude about picking it up. It’s not as depressing because they know that it’s going to turn into something that’s meaningful. So, therefore, you motivate more people to pick it up when they know that it’s not just going to go to the dump. So that has helped kind of fuel the beach clean-ups a little bit more in the area of all along Oregon.

Credit: The Washed Ashore Project

Now we partner with all kinds of organizations for that. Then we have our staff. We actually have full-time people that, you know, one person’s job is she just washes and cuts and drills plastic. That’s all she does. We do that on a regular basis. Currently, I’m the art director. I have actually held almost every job at Washed Ashore, but we just recently hired an executive director, which is really great because she could do a lot of the grants and all the other stuff on the business side, and I can do more the artistic stuff. We have a lead artist, which also is a job I’ve held, who I work with, and I also do some of the actual building. But we have to design and figure out what pieces we’re going to do.

Credit: The Washed Ashore Project

We like to have an inventory that really shows the variety of animals that are affected by plastic pollution. So we’re also doing river to ocean animals and sky to ocean to river to animals. We’ve done polar bears on a melting iceberg. We’ve done a river otter, you know, on the shoreline. So we look at what kind of animals then we do a lot of research. We really research it. I try to get inside the heads of animals and find out everything I can about them so that we can bring that to the work. Then normally, we do have workshops, where we actually cut up things and bring in stuff and prepare like small six-inch by six-inch pieces of wire that people wire mesh that people would then wire pieces on to the wire mesh. So they’ll drill holes, they put wire through, they twist the wire, and then those pieces that have a very specific criteria and craftsmanship that we require. Those small little pieces then come back to the artists that are going to be assembling it. We work with a welder to do a stainless steel welded frame.

We have learned over the years to use stainless steel because we exhibit our work outdoors and in public places. So we need them forkliftable. Double stainless steel is strong; it’s expensive, though. So we have to find the money to do that. So we do also, you know, rely on grants and donations and things like that. But we then create a frame, and then we start putting all these pieces on top of it. The heads usually come off so that I can work on those in my studio. Right now, I’m about to start working on our bald eagle. That is, I’m working on the head of the claws and then the fish that it’s grabbing out of the ocean. My lead artist is doing the body and the water, and we kind of divide things up. We also work collaboratively all the time. So collaboration is a really important part of it working with volunteers. It’s a very different creative process than a lot of art people go through. It’s one I love. I love collaboration.

Kimberly White
Great. I love hearing how it works. I’m really excited to see your eagle once it comes to life. One of my favorites that I’ve seen of your work so far has been the octopus. I found that so amazing. Then the colors! It’s just so lovely.

Angela Pozzi
She is one of my very favorite pieces.

Kimberly White
So how many pieces have you created?

Angela Pozzi
Well, I like to say the Washed Ashore project has created over 80 pieces so far. I think we’re past that now because we just keep making them. We average about anywhere from three to five a year that we create. So we have retired a few. Some from our early work has kind of, you know, we didn’t do stainless steel, so they have osteoporosis, and they start crumbling from the inside. But that’s only one of our old, old, old, old dudes. But yeah, about 80 works of art. I’d say if you count, every little jellyfish we’ve done is probably over; it’s way over 100.

Kimberly White
Wow, that’s impressive. So, how long do these typically take to create, and how much plastic pollution typically goes into creating one of these incredible pieces? Like Octavia, for example?

Credit: The Washed Ashore Project

Angela Pozzi
Oh, you know, everyone wants to know the answers to those questions. It’s such a convoluted process. For instance, we’re working on an eagle right now, which has brown. Brown is one of the least common plastics that wash up on the beaches. We don’t color anything except our screws that we screw in. That’s the only thing we paint. Otherwise, we have to accept the plastic as it comes in. Then we just categorize it, save it until we get enough to create something with. Brown is very uncommon. Brown plastic isn’t used for much except for the soles of shoes, or maybe some flip-flops. So it has taken us quite a few years to accumulate enough brown plastic for the eagle, which also meant we could not do a sea lion or an otter or anything else that is brown in that time period. So that’s a very bizarre process because usually, you could just go get brown paint, or you could just go get whatever you need at the store, but we have to wait for it to wash in. There are certain things that we know we can count on, especially now that I’ve been doing this for 11 years. I know I can count on a lot of black and a lot of white and a lot of blue.

Credit: The Washed Ashore Project

So we’ve done four penguins, we’ve done two whale tails, we’re able to do big black birds easily. But our eagle, it’s gonna have a lot of black mixed with brown in it, because we don’t just still don’t have enough brown for it. So just the accumulation of the materials and then the prepping of the materials. We’ve been spending just a month figuring out which pieces are cut for which things and cut, start cutting the plastic and washing it, cutting it, just a month of just doing that. Usually will take our volunteers a couple of months to actually make the piece work for a piece. The frame takes a month to weld usually; sometimes, it takes me a whole month just to do the head of an animal. Some of those things can all happen at once. Sometimes they can’t. Depending on what else we have going on, we often are working on two or three pieces at once. When I first started Washed Ashore, we did 13 pieces in six months, but only one of them was really large. They also were not as detailed and as good as they are now, so we’re more demanding of ourselves. We like to say that when someone requests a commission, which we get quite a few of those where people ask us to build something specific, we like to have a year, unless we already have piece work already done that can be used or unless we already have enough plastic, and then we can take it down maybe to six months.

Kimberly White
Very interesting. I was wondering how long it would take, and I didn’t know that you guys didn’t paint them. So it’s all the color of the plastic that washes ashore?

Angela Pozzi
Well, and so really, the whole idea is to have people see what washes ashore and to teach them what it is. So we have to always put recognizable things in everything we do. Sometimes we process things a little more; if they’re really big, big pieces, then we chop it up into little pieces. But then, if we process something a lot, we also make sure we have recognizable things, also, in the same piece. We like to keep it, as you know, authentic so people can’t make excuses about it. They also recognize it more if it’s in the color that they would buy in the store.

Kimberly White
What are some of the most common things that you’ve seen wash ashore that you’ve used in your artwork?

Angela Pozzi
Water bottles, first thing water bottles, we get so many drink bottles and water bottles. Not just water, and believe it or not, cans. I don’t know why. I mean, water bottles and cans can all be recycled. So it’s really odd that things that could be recycled are coming ashore so much, but that’s really common. Flip-flops, as if flip-flops were the most common shoe worn in the world, but that’s pretty common. I’m sitting here looking at a piece right next to me that we’ve created, and we use chair parts throughout this whole sturgeon we just made. A lot of times, broken chairs get dumped. This is a really strange thing to me because if it’s a wooden chair, a lot of times people will repair it, or at least they used to. So we also get shotgun shell wads; we get everything.

I mean, the thing that’s so strange is that there isn’t anything I haven’t seen. I mean, everything comes ashore because a lot of places in our world, a lot of rivers are used as dumps by certain countries all around the world and, and a lot of those rivers dump right into the ocean and things last forever. We get things that I swear are like from the 1950s washing ashore that are still recognizable as to what they are because plastic just keeps going. We get a lot of toothbrushes. I mean, toothbrushes don’t disintegrate; they just keep going forever. And it’s just amazing to me. Just everything, bottle caps are everywhere. But we see everything.

Kimberly White
Now the chairs are especially strange, and I wouldn’t have anticipated seeing a lot of those. So that’s interesting. Yeah, water bottles are a huge problem, I would say, especially here in the United States, because when you go to any store, you see plastic bottles. And, you know, we’re in this like throwaway society where we buy something, and we throw something away, but it never really goes away.

Angela Pozzi
Well, and water bottles, you know, people think that drinking water that’s been sitting in plastic is good for them. It really isn’t. There is all kinds of research that is showing it getting into the water that you’re drinking, and, you know, unless it’s something you absolutely have to have because you don’t have a good water source, I would say that your tap water is going to be a lot healthier for you to drink unless it has been proven not to be.

Kimberly White
Yeah, there was a recent study that I found very interesting from WWF Australia, which found that people could be consuming up to five grams of plastic, which is about the size of a credit card, every week. That is just insane to me to even think about, you know, eating a credit card.

Angela Pozzi
They’re saying that our dust is having a lot of plastic in it. And you know, a lot of the fabrics of our clothes, we think about the dust that comes out of your dryer, and if you go look at that outside, a lot of that is plastic-based. So it’s pretty scary. The thing about plastic pollution is it is something we can do something about because it’s what we buy. If we demand a different supply, we can get it turned around, we have to demand, and we have to invest in alternatives to our synthetic world.

Kimberly White
Absolutely, we need to vote with our dollars.

Angela Pozzi
Every purchase is a vote, and so I tell people.

Kimberly White
Yeah, and that goes beyond the plastics crisis as well. It goes with opting for, you know, more sustainable clothing options, opting for less meat and more plant-based and supporting sustainable businesses versus things that are just created to only last one or two times. So what has been one of the most challenging pieces you’ve created?

Angela Pozzi
Well, probably Octavia, the octopus, the one we both love. Because I feel like I got it with her, that makes me very satisfied. I wanted to create an octopus that looked like it was moving. I also know that part of my background is I was a dancer, and I taught creative dance as well. So I love a movement through space, time, and energy, all that, so I really want it, and I love octopuses. They’re just such an amazing beast, and they’re very smart and curious. So I wanted to make a piece that showed curiosity of the animal and also movement. So every one of her arms is actually doing something different. One of them is trying to pull a can out of a cooler. Another one is trying to ride a bicycle. Another one is grabbing a goose. Another one is holding a ball. So she’s doing all these things and moving, and she’s collected things underneath her that she would be curious about. It was also a challenge just to be able to get the skin right, and the tentacles and all that. So that was really fun because I love octopuses. So, I did work with an amazing team that helped make that happen.

Every piece has a different challenge, like the eagle that we’re doing right now is going to be really interesting. I guess that’s why I love working for Washed Ashore because every time is different, we are always learning something, and that you don’t get stuck in a rut. You know, here I have to have to create claws that are grabbing onto a fish that’s being pulled out of the water. So I’ve got to figure out how to do that and how to use the materials I have to do that. You never have the same materials twice, so it’s always a challenge.

Kimberly White
I can imagine, and I think you know again, I just love Octavia. I love the colors you used as well. It’s amazing to end now and knowing that none of that was dyed is even more impressive. It’s really is scary that all of these types of plastics are washing up.

Angela Pozzi
Yeah, yeah, it’s true. It’s true, and a lot of her is because we get these giant fish totes that wash in. They’re the, you know, if you’re a fisherman and you’re out at sea, you’ve got really rough waters, and securing things on your boat is not always easy. And when you’re in a big storm, you know, things fall off. So sometimes we get these giant coolers that their fish are either in or about to go in that wash ashore. When that cooler washed in, it was a maroon red. And because of that cooler and the lid that that also washed it, we were able to make two big sculptures out of that. One of the other ones that I think is my most exciting, challenging piece is Steve the weedy seadragon. I built him actually from scrap, I didn’t have any welded frame, and I built him myself, the whole thing myself. So, that is also one of those pieces, but because of that fish tote, we actually had another fish to come in. I was able to do both of those sculptures.

Credit: The Washed Ashore Project

Kimberly White
So, what is the largest piece you’ve created so far?

Angela Pozzi
Well, I mean, our eagle sculpture right now has a 16 foot by nine-foot base, 16 feet, the longest we’ve ever made a sculpture. Well, that’s not true. Steve, the weedy seadragon, is 18 feet long and 10 feet tall, but he’s kind of skinny. So he might be the biggest. Then we have a polar bear on an iceberg that’s 10 feet tall, and we have Brody, the Adelie penguin is 10 feet tall. It depends how much mass I mean, who knows what’s our biggest we just go for whatever is big. We try to make it so you can’t ignore them. The other thing is, we want to make sure that they hover over people so that when you’re in a crowd, you can look and you can still see them. Or if they’re outside, where they’re compared to buildings, and you know, cars, they’re still looking big. So you have to make things really big if you’re displaying outside especially.

Kimberly White
Yes, and I imagine the size and knowing that its plastic pollution helps to provide that wake-up call for people who are viewing it.

Angela Pozzi
Oh, exactly. It’s a big problem. It needs big art. We are limited by what fits on a truck because we are a traveling exhibit. So seven feet wide is as wide as we can go. And nine feet tall is as high as we can go unless it bends over and lays down and has a hinge in it, which is what we have on a couple of our pieces. So we do have some limitations.

Kimberly White
So, Washed Ashore has engaged your local community. Can you tell us more about how you’re working with your community and how this has been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic?

Angela Pozzi
Oh, COVID has been so hard for us and for our community. Everywhere, of course, but as far as keeping people involved, we still have people going to the beach on their own. We don’t do beach clean-ups as a group. But we’ve always asked people to go on their own, especially every time they go to the beach to pick up stuff; you don’t really need an organized beach clean-up. And that’s, that’s kind of funny that oftentimes people have thought they had to have one in order to go do something, you just bring a bag or a bucket whenever you go to the beach and pick it up and bring it to us. So that’s been able to continue. Our workshops have been shut down. Our exhibit hall in Bandon has been shut since March, I made that call early, and we have kept it shut. We’re a hands-on tactile interactive exhibit, so I didn’t see any way we were going to be able to stay open. Our workshops are like schools that everyone shares materials. So that also is just impossible.

The cool thing is, and something I’m really excited that I can talk to you about and to your listeners is that this eagle that we’re doing will be premiered at Norfolk Botanical Garden in Virginia this summer. We are actually starting a new program where we can involve anybody. In fact, I’m sitting in the studio, and this weekend, I’ll be working on how to make kits to send out to people so that they can be part of the project, and that is just a whole new thing for us. So we’re gonna sterilize everything before we package it. Then we’re going to have videos online that show you how to put it together, and we’ll have instructions, then people will be able to do what they’ve always done is you can say, “I helped build this bald eagle,” and then you could go see it and say, “See, I helped build that, I made one of those!” Then everyone takes ownership in it, and then they’re a part of it, and that’s a lot of who Washed Ashore is, so we want to keep that alive, and so we’re giving it a shot. I started this, and it’s actually kind of funny; I was inspired by Kelly Clarkson.

Kelly Clarkson’s show got ahold of me and was excited about Washed Ashore. They highlighted us on their show last year, and then they connected me up with a ten-year-old at the time who wanted to learn how to work with us. So I started sending her piece work, and she and her family started doing it. I did this whole instruction thing with her. So I realized, you know, well, if I can do this with her, then I can do this with anybody. So that’s what inspired us. So this little girl Ashlyn has helped us with piece work for our sturgeon, and the sturgeon is actually going to go on the Kelly Clarkson show. I think we are, too, if we can ever get through the COVID thing. So that inspired us to think that, well, maybe we should try reaching out to other people and maybe we should try doing something really important.

So the eagle is such a perfect time for us to do this right now because the eagle is a sign; it’s our symbol of the United States of America. It is a symbol of our democracy, and it is a time right now when we all need to feel unified. We’re all in this COVID world together and suffering together, and we are also, you know, to do something positive to help. A problem is something we all need to help with. So we love the idea of Washed Ashore as an organization to help create a symbol of America by America, all helping us build the bald eagle. So in the next month, if people go to our website, they’ll be able to find out more of how to be a part of the project. We’re still figuring it out right now. We’re trying to get it tested out with our local folks, and then definitely, in March, we’re gonna start reaching out across the country.

Kimberly White
That’s really exciting. I am looking forward to that. I know I will be looking for the episode with the Kelly Clarkson show. Before we go, is there anything else you’d like to share with our audience?

Angela Pozzi
Well, I guess I just want to say that plastic pollution is a really depressing topic. And it is something like I said that we can all do something about today, every day, you can do something about it. So in that regard, it does offer us hope. Again, that just like you said, your purchase is your vote. Start bringing a reusable water bottle, bring your own bag to the store, whatever you can; some places don’t allow it right now. And think about the purchases you make for gifts. Think about the packaging that is used for the gifts. You know, think about supporting your local farmers market when you can to eliminate packaging, you know, all those things, there’s so much we can do. And really, one of the things I love the most about Washed Ashore, sure there’s a lot of things, but I love the fact that our work proves that your every action adds up to do something amazing. Because all of these sculptures that you see that we’ve created would not be possible without every little tiny action that made it happen. The person who picked that thing up off the beach, the person who decided to drive it over and dump it off in our parking lot, the person who, you know, scrubbed it, the person who drilled a whole another person put a wire through it and somebody else did something else. All those things do add up, just like everything that we do add up. If we add the positives rather than negatives, we’re going in the right direction. So that’s my main message.

Kimberly White
Thank you, Angela. And thank you for joining us today. Washed Ashore, using art to raise awareness about one of our planet’s most pervasive problems-plastic pollution. And that’s it for today. Please join us next time for another episode of The Planetary Podcast.

Website: The Washed Ashore Project

Twitter: @WashedAshoreArt