Spring 2023 graduation keynote speaker Pam Longobardi archives ocean’s plastics in “Ocean Gleaning”

Peculiar traces of man-made refuse drift ashore around the world. These assemblages — say, a scuba face mask covered in barnacle or netting and rope tangled on wet rock — provide a piecemeal story of plastic adrift in our oceans. Lamar Dodd School of Art alumna, 2021 Margie E West Prize winner, and Spring 2023 graduation keynote speaker Pam Longobardi (’81, BFA) has spent the last 15 years sourcing, documenting, and compositing these plastics in her arts practice.

This past year, Fall Line Press in Atlanta published 15 years of Longobardi’s work molding these chance objects into sculptures that evoke unsustainable consumption and interconnected consequence in the book Ocean Gleaning. The artist has sourced her materials through international ocean cleanups along the Pacific Ocean, the Caribbean, and the Mediterranean, involving communities in removing the accumulated heaps. Longobardi has also invited collaboration in her project by crowd-sourcing documentation of the world’s floating ephemera, with 75 contributors featured in her latest book.

Writer Sarah Rose Sharp has detailed Longobardi’s book in a recent article in online arts publication Hyperallergic titled “A Crowd-Sourced Archive of Our Oceans’ Plastics.” Read an excerpt of the article below —

The tension in Ocean Gleaning — and Longobardi’s work in general — is multifold. Plastic is both enemy force and subject, lionized almost by default through the artist’s careful arrangement and presentation of aesthetic objects. Longobardi’s relationship with plastic is reciprocal, not simply one of observation but of conversation.

“These plastics things are the most charged objects I have ever encountered,” the artist said. “They are both familiar and decidedly alien, zombie-like objects that are returning from the ‘dead’ of the waste stream, now full of information and conveying messages from the ocean.”

Ocean Gleaning captures plastic as it gathers a biological slime of algae and protozoans that becomes attachment sites for colonial bivalves, barnacles, and bryozoans, a “living crust” that enables it to better imitate food for the creatures that didn’t evolve with it and ingest it.

Artist Bio

Pam Longobardi’s parents, an ocean lifeguard and the Delaware state diving champion, connected her from an early age to the water. She moved to Atlanta in 1970 and saw her neighborhood pond drained to build the high school she attended. Since then, she lived for varying time periods in Wyoming, Montana, California, and Tennessee, and worked as a firefighter and tree planter, a scientific illustrator and an aerial mapmaker, a collaborative printer and a color mixer. Her artwork involves painting, photography and installation to address the psychological relationship of humans to the natural world. She has exhibited across the US and in Greece, Monaco, Germany, Finland, Slovakia, China, Japan, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Costa Rica and Poland. She currently lives and works in Atlanta as Regents’ Professor and Distinguished Professor of Art at Georgia State University and drifts with the ongoing Drifters Project, following the world ocean currents.