Plastic is pervasive in the oceans. From giant plastic garbage patches to plastic nano-particles finding their way into sea life and thus humans. Angela Haseltine Pozzi is using the plastic flotsam to create sculpture.
Haseltine Pozzi gathers plastic bottle caps, cocktail toothpicks, shotgun shell casings and detergent bottles that wash up on her hometown beach at the town of Bandon on the southern Oregon coast. The debris come from as far away as Asia and Europe. So far, she has fabricated eighty life-size animals, real and imagined: a jellyfish made of golf balls, sharks from flip flops and plastic lighters. Haseltine Pozzi Haseltine Pozzi gathers plastic bottle caps, cocktail toothpicks, shotgun shell casings and detergent bottles that wash up on her hometown beach at the town of Bandon on the southern Oregon coast. The debris come from as far away as Asia and Europe. So far, she has fabricated eighty life-size animals, real and imagined: a jellyfish made of golf balls, sharks from flip flops and plastic lighters.
Her work is on display in her Bandon gallery, the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C. and at the Tulsa, Oklahoma Zoo. The Tulsa exhibition moves to the Portland, Oregon in January 2020. She founded the non-profit Washed Ashore to support her work and her proselytizing mission.
So far Haseltine Pozzi’s work has repurposed twenty-six tons of garbage. She foresees no imminent shortage of raw materials. Single-use water bottles bearing the insignia of the 2008 Olympics in China are still washing up on Oregon beaches. “Single-use plastics are the most dangerous because you use it and in five minutes you’re done with it and then it lasts a thousand years,” she says.
Some places are getting the message. The Hawaiian island of Oahu recently banned singe-use plastics — plates, tableware, take-out food containers and utensils. Oahu represents seventy percent of the state’s population, including Honolulu, Hawaii’s largest city.
