The Planetary Podcast

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.

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.

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...