She turns rubbish into lovely art pieces

Jbjsaturday

FLASH the marlin is a fine fish and a fine piece of rubbish. Standing just outside the National Zoo’s visitor centre in Washington, he is poised, mouth open, to make a splash in a wave of turquoise fishing nets and clear plastic bottles.

His gills, made from toilet seats, are rather dirty; his long bill, narrowing to a point that seems sharp enough to pierce a small fish – or at least a plastic rubbish bag – is made from three fishing rods.

His eyes – well, if the eyes are a window into the soul, Flash’s soul has seen better days. His creator, pointing to one of the sculpture’s large silvery eyes, says it was made from a mayonnaise lid, a beer can, a motor oil container and a silver sandal. The socket was made from a deflated beach ball.

Flash, a 385kg sculpture made almost entirely of plastic that washed up on the beach, is one of 17 larger-than-life marine sculptures created to celebrate World Oceans Day.

Made by a team of artists and volunteers led by Angela Haseltine Pozzi, Washed Ashore, is an art exhibition with a message. As Haseltine Pozzi puts it: “Plastic pollution is just choking the ocean. It’s hurting the animals and we have to change our consumer habits.”

A former art teacher, Haseltine Pozzi grew up spending summers at a cabin in the seaside town of Bandon, Oregon. She turned to the ocean after the death of her husband, Craig, from a brain tumour in 2004.

One afternoon a few years after her husband’s death, she looked down at one of her favourite beaches and saw a line of “tiny little plastics” stretched across the shore “as far as your eye could see.” The plastic bits were pieces of rub- bish that had washed up by the waves. Noticing beachcombers searching for shells further down the shore, she decided she needed to find a way “to get those people to pick up that stuff ”.

Haseltine, now 58, decided that turning it into beautiful art, showing some of the animals most affected by ocean pollution, was the solution.

In 2010 she founded Washed Ashore, a non-profit organisation, and in the past six years, she said, the group has collected about 18 tons of rubbish from more than 480km of Oregon coastline. – Washington Post

Flash is a sculpture of a marlin made of rubbish picked up on the beach.