Roxy TILSE

Flour.
Milk.
Coffee grounds.
Meat glue.
And just one curious scoop of alginate.

Individually, they whisper domesticity, baking, breakfast, the bitter joy of caffeine. But together, under curious hands, they begin to murmur of something else. Of possibility. Of form. Of new textures that squish, stretch, crack and hold. This is not food. Not quite waste. Not quite useful. Not yet.

Every year, the UK produces over 5 million tonnes of flour. In Europe, milk flows in figures so vast it could fill oceans, or at least 62,465 Olympic pools. Globally, 18 million tonnes of coffee grounds are cast away as waste. And meat glue? Present in medicine and textiles yes, but also a fine dining secret, it binds steaks with surgical precision, then disappears.

But what if none of this was the end of the story?

What if the leftovers had more to say?

Notes from the Mundane dares to ask absurdly simple questions with quietly radical implications:
What happens when we stop seeing ingredients as edible or inedible, clean or dirty, useful or expired, and just start experimenting? What if glue comes from enzymes, structure from softness, and beauty from rot?

These ingredients were coaxed into unfamiliar forms through alchemical play and low-tech processes - set, stirred, dried. Their behaviours surprised. They cracked like plaster. They squished like rubber. They curled, stiffened, softened, smelled. They held the memory of the mundane, but no longer entirely belonged to it.

The final works sit within a domestic space. A playful provocation. I invite you to ask:
Is this something you could’ve made at home? Should you? Would you?

This isn’t about solving sustainability in one clever swoop. It’s about looking again. About recognising that alternative material futures might not arrive in shiny packaging, but instead rise up from the remains of breakfast, or yesterday’s dinner, or the dust in the corner of your shelf.