Renowned Indian sand artist and Padma Awardee Sudarsan Pattnaik have won the People’s Choice Award at a prestigious sand sculpting festival in the US, wowing the American public with his sculpture that highlighted the message of combating plastic pollution in oceans. Pattnaik was among the 15 top sand artists selected from across the world to participate in the 2019 Revere Beach International Sand Sculpting Festival in Boston, Massachusetts.
He won the People’s Choice Award for his sand sculpture ‘Stop Plastic Pollution, Save Our Ocean’. The award-winning sculpture showed a turtle caught in a plastic bag and a fish with plastic trash such as slippers, bottles and glass inside its body. The tail of the fish is in the mouth of a human, signifying how plastic pollution in the oceans is adversely impacting human beings also when they consume seafood.