Pamela Longobardi

Pam Longobardi (born 1958) is an American contemporary artist and ecofeminist, currently living and working in Atlanta, Georgia. She is known internationally for sculptural works and installations created from plastic debris, primarily from marine and coastal environments, as a primary material. Much of her work includes community-based research, such as carbon or plastic audits, as well as collaborative art creation. 
In 2013, Longobardi was awarded The Hudgens Prize and in 2014, she earned the title Distinguished University Professor of Art at Georgia State, and was named Artist-in-Residence of the Oceanic Society. In 2019, she was appointed Regents’ Professor by the Board of Regents for the State of Georgia.
Early life and education.
Pam Longobardi grew up in New Jersey, the child of an ocean lifeguard and a Delaware state diving champion, and credits her parents' relationship to the water with her own scientific and artistic interests. Longobardi moved to Atlanta in 1970. 
She received a B.S. in Science Education from Montana State University in 1982. Longobardi then went on to earn her M.F.A. degree, also from Montana State University.
Career.
The entanglement of science and art is central to Longobardi's practice and aesthetic: "I see some aspects of the methodology of the artist and scientist as very similar: long periods of intensive research, immersion in materials to better understand their properties, inquisitiveness and curiosity as driving forces, a desire to unpack ‘reality’ to better understand our relationship to it."
Since 2006, Longobardi has been engaged in The Drifters Project. Begun in 2006, its name taken from the term "drift" – objects that are carried by currents and air. Ocean drift is, today, primarily plastic. Longobardi has collected this drift plastic to create abstract sculptures and installations. One iteration of The Drifters Project was displayed at the 2009 Venice Biennale, at the ARTE VISIVI collateral exhibitions. In 2010, Edizione Charta (Milan, NY) produced a photo-essay book entitled Drifters: Plastics, Pollution, Personhood that included photographs and essays by Longobardi and three other writers.
"All these things collapse for me in the drifting ocean plastic object: it IS an artifact of my specific human evolutionary time; it IS made from petroleum that is the fossil sunlight and ancient plants, animals and yes, dinosaurs, that roamed the past Earth; it IS a biological raft for invasive creatures; it IS a toxic floating time bomb that is changing the human and animal body and the very ocean itself; and it IS a future fossil of the Anthropocene."
In 2013 Longobardi was selected to be lead artist in the GYRE Expedition, an art-science research expedition that assembled a team of notable marine scientists, journalists, filmmakers and artists to trawl remote Alaskan coastlines and to document collaboratively the impacts of plastic pollution on these delicate ecosystems. Her colleagues on the expedition included chief exhibition scientist Carl Safina, artist Mark Dion, filmmaker J.J. Kelly, photographer Andy Hughes, and others: all of these are featured, along with Longobardi, in a twenty-minute National Geographic film, "GYRE", which aired in 2013. Of Longobardi, Dion says "Her knowledge of the subject and commitment is extraordinary." The artistic outcomes from this expedition were shown first at the exhibition entitled "Gyre: The Plastic Ocean" at the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center in Anchorage, Alaska, a show which later travelled to the CDC's Museum in Atlanta, Georgia and other museums across the U.S.. Longobardi's contributions include "Economies of Scale" and "Bounty, Pilfered," both characteristic of her sculptural found-plastic installations. Longobardi uses "materials like sulfurated potash and sodium chloride to oxidize expanses of copper, pouring and wiping different mixtures over the surfaces" to make scenes that "appear otherworldly" but in a series entitled "Anthropocene", she "keeps them decidedly earth-based."
Longobardi also produces paintings with an "elemental aesthetic," incorporating natural processes such as chemical patinas that also crystallize; light-sensitive photo imaging, magnetism, mirror reflection, after-image, and phosphorescence.