An hour with… artist Sienna Murdoch

When I knock on the door of Sienna Murdoch, Geline artist, I expect to meet a cheerful, primary-schoolteacher type extolling the merits of childlike joy and rediscovering a sense of play. Instead I am greeted by an ethereal figure dressed in black, half haunted Victorian child, half 90s film goth, who ushers me through a softly minimalist, light-filled east London house. Within minutes, she’s talking me through the composition of biomaterials and the effects of delayed gratification on desire. “I’m not really interested in nostalgia or the whimsy of jelly,” she says. “Sometimes, when I get calls for projects asking for jelly-specific things, I lose my will to live a little bit.”

Geline is Murdoch’s own creation – “a suspended, hydrated, flesh-like material,” she says – concocted during lockdown using open-source resources from universities, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (“There’s lots of experimentation going on in the Netherlands,” she says, slightly ominously.) After some trial and error, Geline was born: it’s vegan (derived from carrageenan, a gelling agent extracted from the seaweed Irish Moss), sustainable (it can be melted down and reused) and extremely pleasing to look at in a way that feels difficult to define. Murdoch says its appeal comes down to the interplay between imagination and reality: “You’re constantly thinking it’s something you recognise, but it’s unsettling because something’s off. That ambiguity is powerful.”

Ahead of our photoshoot, Murdoch had set up several tables in her living room, which is also her studio (“It gets everywhere – not very hygienic”), with a selection of gleaming mounds. There are shapes that look like seashells, factory machinery, candlestick holders, slabs of stone and crystal bowls. It does, I must admit, look quite a bit like jelly, but an elevated kind: one that would not feel out of place at a high-fashion show or a celestial banquet. The inception of Geline, after all, was an alien feast in the 2023 film The Marvels, a commission Murdoch almost turned down. “I got an email that said, can you do a 50ft table of alien desserts? So stressful,” she shudders. Fortunately, she relented, finessing the formula for a resilient, jelly-like substance that would not wilt under the bright lights of a film set.

The decision changed the course of her career. Since then, Murdoch has created props for film, TV and music videos (Gladiator II, Bridgerton, PinkPantheress), collaborated with fashion brands (Hermès, Stella McCartney, Isamaya) and galleries (including a decadent spread , curated by the chef Skye Gyngell for the Serpentine Gallery’s summer party last year). One of her more outré creations is a set of wearable breasts, which the designer-turned-clown Paulina Lenoir hands to an audience member during her live shows, who is then invited to breastfeed her with them. Last year, Murdoch created a rabbit stew for Daniel Day-Lewis to consume as part of his role in the psychological drama Anemone. “This was an opportunity to cook for one of my heroes. So I made it the most intensely delicious thing. There were no cut corners. I marinated the onions in juniper for two days. I wanted everything to be perfect.”

Growing up in Hammersmith, Murdoch was “very tender and sensorial – I loved putting my hands deep into the sandpit. There was lots of rummaging.” She was “extremely sensitive”, which made traditional education a struggle: “I was moving around schools and needed a lot of support, and maybe didn’t get what I would have done now, if there had been more awareness of mental health.” She turned to sculpture to express herself, earning a BTec in the discipline. One of her first jobs was making wings for the “dove bikes” in the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony, after which she worked for various production designers, and briefly opened a juice bar in Peckham, which “turned into a club and a dive bar” and led her towards the food world. She is relieved to have found a material as unusual and versatile as Geline. “It doesn’t behave in a traditional way,” she says, with real affection. “It’s coming from an off-kilter, outsider’s perspective. I feel extremely lucky to have found a material that encapsulates all of those hardships.”

Last spring, Murdoch had her debut solo show at Frieze No 9 Cork Street, in which audiences were forbidden to touch the works until 2pm on the final day, when touching was encouraged. “It was like New Year’s Eve – everyone just went straight in,” she recalls. “Touch is an interesting arena. I wasn’t concerned with it when I first started this, but it’s something that has appeared naturally. People always ask, ‘Can I touch it?’” Murdoch is not averse to Nigella levels of innuendo, as befits someone whose works are often bulges, sausage shapes and “glands”.

The urge to touch, I can attest, is a powerful one. Several minutes into our conversation, I am invited to touch the Geline, a moment I’ve been anticipating. Among the assortment of glistening creations, my eye is drawn to six magnificent globes: perfectly round, shiny baubles that look like edible jewels or candied fruit. I prod one gently with the tip of my finger: “Ooh,” I coo. The texture is surprisingly firm, slightly cold, and not sticky but not quite smooth either. It is very fun to touch, but feels illicit, which of course only makes it more fun. Is it edible, I ask. “You’re welcome to,” she deadpans. “You wouldn’t die, but you wouldn’t call me back. It’s chewy and salty and alkaline – like conditioner.”

Inspiration, and moulds, come from all around: sex toys, farming tools, objects found in the street, vegetables, children’s toys. Film is a reference point: Murdoch runs a film club exploring the subject of seduction, whose most recent screening was Bound, the Wachowski sisters’ cult erotic thriller and a “good example of tactile cinema – the whites of their eyes look like yoghurt pots”. The urge to rummage remains: when she’s not working, she relaxes by going through archives, from the Bishopsgate Institute’s to those in the June L Mazer Lesbian Archives in California. She is fascinated by “the history of queer objects that enable you to become what you want to be through this sort of material: limbs or breasts or fillers or latex”.

Fantasy is at the heart of what Murdoch does. Her next projects range from gemstones made of biomaterials and shapes that can be turned into chocolate to a hotel room in Frankfurt, viewable by appointment, in which all surfaces will be covered in Geline. “I want to seduce people into climate-conscious ways through fantasy and sci-fi,” she says. “I’m developing a dreamworld that’s not of this world: biomaterials you can build houses out of, or that serve fantasy functions, or fantasy tech. I like biomaterial surrealism as a way of developing the future in the way that surrealism used to – to dream away from the horrors.”