Mr. McGuire: There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?
-The Graduate, 1967

I’ve been going to fewer art fairs in the past few months because the wares are starting to look the same: they’ve become a haze of quilted totes, oversized sunglasses, and animal themes (please bring an end to the owls). So it was refreshing to see local designer Beth O’Rourke’s Deep Deep Trouble in Potrero recently–her repurposed found items manage to be both entertaining and startling. Concerned that “plastics are poisoning our oceans,” she started crafting one-off objects featuring snarky language and trash (and yes, you will actually want them, despite how that sounds).

TheSanFranista: How did you start designing these objects? They’re most un-mass producable.

Beth O’Rourke: Some people collect shells and sea glass, I collect plastic. It all began at Ocean Beach…on the heels of one particularly tempestuous winter storm. In addition to the sea monster-like tangles of bulb kelp, the beach was littered with all shapes and sizes of plastic. I felt that I had to do something with this cast-off material (garbage) in order to draw attention to the fact that plastic is just as much a presence in our ocean and on our beaches as naturally occurring rocks, shells, seaweed, and driftwood. In order to tell the story of discarded plastic, I took a campaign approach, albeit sarcastic, and wrote and excerpted lines from advertising, pop culture, and environmental research, [to] extol the virtues of plastics and demonstrate how they plague us.

SF: What materials do you use and how do you source them?
BO: My source, plastic materials, are found washed up on the shore of beaches, mostly where I play with my family and surf in and around San Francisco. I then cast them in polyester resin I procure from Douglas and Sturgess, a great supply store here in the city. I use are polyproylene (non-stick) molds and I print the lettering on transparency film using my ink jet printer, always using the font “Cooper Black.”

The font choice was important to me because in 1918, right after the end of World War 1, improvements in chemical technology led to an explosion in new forms of plastics. In 1921, Oswald Bruce Cooper design his eponymous font, which has influences of Art Deco and the Machine Age. I very much think of fonts as a “material” since their presence can influence the perception of the finished object.

SF: Why is this valuable to you?
BO: It’s satisfying to feel as though I am drawing attention to a perceived environmental problem through constructing something (hopefully) more valuable from useless garbage.

All images are property of Deep Deep Trouble.

(I do wish the “mess” object read “hot mess”–it would make a killer paperweight for those days. Maybe she can be commissioned?)