Digital food culture loves the gelatinous. Paris Rosina makes panna cottas from cartoon cat moulds; Arôme Cassis makes pomegranate jellies inside the skin of a pomegranate, captured chopped into trembling wedges. The hyper colourful 2000s optimism of Ottolenghi has given way to a playful, slightly perverse sternness, where the food of the Victorian nursery is presented on pewter plates in dim lighting. It borrows its vibes from Jane Grigson’s English Food (1974) or Patience Gray’s Honey from a Weed (1986). Jelly is the ultimate expression of the moment – ambiguously sexual, childish and malleable. It is also escaping the kitchen: in June, Gucci launched an ad campaign featuring jelly Marmont bags, and jelly shoes remain the viral shoe of the summer. The conspiracy-minded among us might also point to the virality of the otherwise innocuous soft toy company, Jellycat.

Sienna Murdoch’s work concentrates and clarifies jelly into an artistic practise. Her jelly forms were born from her work as a prop-maker for film, after she was commissioned to make a 12-metre table of food for a Marvel project representing “what aliens would eat in a war zone”. Forms had to move, and last on set for months, so Murdoch invented her own biomaterial, capable of movement, translucency, even when sitting under hot lights: from there, a practice was born. Murdoch casts the material in moulds made from fruit, vegetables, kids’ toys, packaging and blister packs; Turkish cucumbers, custard apples, bitter gourd, piped biscuits, squashes, cherries and raspberries in colours, as she puts it, “you could imagine coughing up”.

They’re edible, in the sense that they wouldn’t kill you. They would just give you a stomach ache, and probably, taste a bit like shampoo

Jelly is an ethereal, unnatural substance, first produced by boiling the feet of calves and dying with violet juice, saffron, cochineal or spinach. It made its first appearance in a cookbook in 1747. Its strange properties make it an inbetween substance, both organic and alien. In her 2024 book Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxicants, Jelly, Rot, Kyla Wazana Tompkins writes that jelly’s weirdness is related to the abject: “The gelatinous, squishy, and sticky have a particular history connected to abjection”, writes Tompkins. This is partly because “Gelatin absorbs and makes visual and kinetic what is sometimes not describable or utterable – what is felt – but is nonetheless present in its vicinity; it makes what might otherwise be preconscious visible.” It’s the cultural food form of this moment because it intersects with a more widespread celebration of greediness and guzzling – perhaps in response to our unending era of austerity, which if you are 30, you have lived within for your entire adult life.

Murdoch is ambivalent about lifestyle and its aspirational flavours. Her work takes the elements of contemporary food culture – glowiness, viscerality, simplicity, whether appealing and revolting – and turns the dial all the way up. But it isn’t food, though technically you could eat them. “They’re edible, in the sense that they wouldn’t kill you,” says Murdoch, “but they have lots of glycerin and vegetable oils in them. They’re not fat or syrup, but they’re somewhere in between. They would just give you a stomach ache, and probably, would taste a bit like shampoo.” En masse, they look like landscapes, not centrepieces, presented in what Murdoch calls an “absurd tableau.” “I wanted to maintain their ambiguity between food sculpture, sex toy or children’s toy,” she says, and this format means that “they are all speaking to each other.”

Jelly is a function of the social. As Tompkins writes, “The gelatinous or the viscous … function[s] as a keyword for a form of social connection” – the ability to describe the “historical density” of other bodies that one encounters every day. Tompkins goes further, writing that it also is capable of acting in “uncannily agential ways [that] undermine human-centred subject-object hierarchies and the social systems that spin outward from them.” They are human and alien – but only as alien as fruits, vegetables and other life forms that familiarity tends to obscure. Murdoch’s funny, unknowable, appealing, repellent jellies speak to us as much as each other – they call for us to look anew at the textures of the familiar world and find  it very strange. 

For TANK, Sienna made a series of objects currently dominating consumer-core lifestyle culture, in a gelatinous version of the meme starter pack. Opposite, spot a BuzzBall, an heirloom tomato, D.S. & Durga perfume, a Margiela Tabi, a Lost Mary, a Sando, a Negroni, Perello olives, Torres crisps, Galoises, a lemon wedge and a single cherry. Photo by Sienna Murdoch .