Pam Longobardi is an artist and activist and a professor at Georgia State University. She is also a professor at Oceanic Society’s Artist-In-Nature. Pam founded the Drifters Project in 2006. After hitting a plastic mountain, the ocean erupted on a remote Hawaiian beach. As part of the Drifters project, she collects, documents, installs, and transforms marine plastics into photos. This piece is a visual representation of the engine of global consumption and the huge number of plastic items and their impact on some of the world’s most remote places and creatures.
Longobardi is the recipient of the Margie E. West Prize. This is a prize given out annually to an alumni of the Lamar Dodd School of Art. She was invited to create a new display at the Marjorie E. West Gallery.
As you can see in this picture, the size of this piece is absolutely massive. These are just a few of the items they have found round the world in even the most remote places. Imagine the amount of plastic items they have found in heavily populated areas of the world. Probably millions of these pieces could be made. It’s so interesting to see artwork made out of a global problem we have nowadays. It really sheds a light to how much us as people of this world waste and either don’t dispose of it properly, or do dispose of it properly it just doesn’t have anywhere to go. This piece specifically by Pam Longobardi is called “Bounty, Pilfered.”
As you can see here, this video, Watch the National Geographic‘s video, shows Pam creating a piece of artwork made from plastic found on the Alaskan coast.
This piece above comes in at 12 ft by 8 ft. It uses 627 pieces of ocean plastic from Hawaii, Alaska, Costa Rica, California, Greece, Indonesia, Belize, Panama, Alabama and Georgia.
Shown here are just a few of the pieces Longobardi and colleagues have worked on. These pieces really capture the seriousness of plastic pollution, while enticing the audience looking at the piece and making it attractive looking. When making artwork, I think it’s especially important to make it look attractive. Especially if you’re trying to send a message to the audience, you should make your artwork colorful and attractive so it catches the audiences eyes. Once it catches their eyes, they can read the description about it off to the side at the exhibition and learn more about plastic solution and why it’s such a big and prevalent problem in the world today.
https://www.plasticpollutioncoalition.org/blog/2017/5/2/10-inspiring-works-of-art-about-plastic-pollution
https://driftersproject.net