A wonderful thing bubbled up from the deep blue sea this summer: an invitation for an ocean residency and artwork commission at Patina Maldives, an eco-resort with primary mission of functional sustainability and an art collection that includes a commissioned Skyscape architecture by renowned artist James Turrell. The Maldives is a place that has long been on my mind ever since I learned it was the lowest lying country on earth and would be ‘ground zero’ for sea level rise from climate change. The Maldives is an island nation of 1,190 coral islands, with 80% of them standing less than 1 meter above sea level. Maldives is also the home of a most inspirational person, Mohammed Nasheed, the man who spearheaded the first democratic election in the Maldives after 3 decades of a despotic ruler, and was instrumental in forging the first-ever global climate treaty, the UN Paris Agreement in

My art uses plastic recovered from beaches around the world to understand how our consumer society is transforming the ocean Pam Longobardi, Georgia State University I am obsessed with plastic objects. I harvest them from the ocean for the stories they hold and to mitigate their ability to harm. Each object has the potential to be a message from the sea – a poem, a cipher, a metaphor, a warning. My work collecting and photographing ocean plastic and turning it into art began with an epiphany in 2005, on a far-flung beach at the southern tip of the Big Island of Hawaii. At the edge of a black lava beach pounded by surf, I encountered multitudes upon multitudes of plastic objects that the angry ocean was vomiting onto the rocky shore. I could see that somehow, impossibly, humans had permeated the ocean with plastic waste. Its alien presence was so enormous