Resident Prune: Sandra Githinji

Q. Tell us a bit about you and where we find you at this time in your journey and creative practices.

I’m currently an Associate Lecturer at RMIT teaching in the Bachelor of Interior Design, and I also facilitate workshops for diasporic communities. I’m a designer, even if I’m not always actively practising, and a curator as well. Designer, curator, educator. A few different hats.

I'm also undertaking a Creative Practice PhD. It's probably the most personal work I've ever done because it's asking me to look closely at my own experiences of migration, identity and home-making, and to understand how those experiences connect to broader social and cultural histories.

There are projects that tap into the artist in me and others that tap into the designer. As an artist, I’m usually exploring an idea, question or perspective that I want to express. The work starts from within and moves outward. Design is inherently relational and responsive. It begins with listening, understanding a person, community, context, or need and asking how you can create something that serves, supports or enriches their experience.

Q. What informed your path to design? What were the signs along the way?

My mum loves digging through old photos and memorabilia and sending it to my siblings and me. A few years ago, she sent me an article from when I was in grade five. I’d been shortlisted for an art prize and was asked what I wanted to do when I grew up. My answer was architecture or interior design because I loved art and how it reflected the human condition. Incredibly profound for a 10-year-old.

I grew up in Nairobi and left when I was 18 for Melbourne. At high school there was a strong emphasis on science and business. The humanities were secondary. My best friend and I practically lived in the art room and ended up creating our own unofficial study plan just so we could take on more humanities subjects.

My brother was living in Melbourne at the time and spoke so highly of it as a creative city. RMIT offered an interior design program where I could study design alongside art history, so it felt like the right fit.

Looking back, I’m amazed my parents let me move halfway across the world. I’d never lived outside Kenya before. I was incredibly homesick in those early years and went home every chance I could.

Q. When did you first feel you had something to say as an artist?

Probably in 2020. Lockdown, the Black Lives Matter movement, and years of overworking had caught up with me. There were days when I simply couldn’t get out of bed.

Around that time I had started reading up on African architecture and design history. I realised the gaps in my education. I was discovering stories of African queens and women who had achieved extraordinary things, yet their names were largely absent from mainstream narratives.

That led to the Queen Nandi Vase. I wanted to create something functional but rooted in ritual and storytelling. Something sculptural and figurative. I didn’t know how to 3D print, so I bought a printer and taught myself through YouTube videos. The first attempts were terrible. Thankfully a friend helped me troubleshoot. Eventually I launched a Kickstarter campaign on Valentine’s Day and raised enough money to manufacture the piece properly.

The world wasn’t asking for that object, but I needed it. In many ways it was for me first.

Q. How do you push through when others doubt?

I think my mum planted a healthy amount of delulu in all of us kids. She has an incredible capacity for hope. Whenever we bring her a problem, there’s always a way forward.

What I’ve learnt over the years is that when I follow the things that genuinely excite me or stir my curiosity, opportunities tend to emerge. I try not to work in resistance. It’s not always easy, but once you have done it a few times, your life becomes a case study to give you comfort.

Q. What’s your relationship to bathing?

To be honest, I don’t really have one, which is part of why I was so excited about this residency. It felt like an invitation to develop a new relationship with water, rest and ritual.

I grew up in Nairobi for most of my life, but when I was younger my dad was posted to Mombasa for three years, so we had the opportunity to live on the Kenyan coast. I remember school finishing at noon, eating lunch and then heading straight to the beach.

That was paradise to me. Not necessarily swimming, but simply wading in the ocean. Standing at the shoreline with my feet submerged was enough. It isn't quite bathing, but those are some of my earliest and most enduring memories of being in relationship with water. I think this residency has allowed me to reconnect with that feeling in a different way.

Q. Tell us about the experience of creating an installation.

After the Queen Nandi Vase project, I was contacted by CB2, a North American retailer, who invited me to contribute to a collection of furniture and objects. The conversation began in 2021 and the collection was eventually released in 2023.

Around the same time, a friend encouraged me to apply for Nairobi Design Week, despite having absolutely no idea how I was going to deliver it from the other side of the world. To my surprise, CB2 came on board as a partner, which made the project possible.

I collaborated with an architect friend based in New York on the design, while my dad, who is a civil engineer, helped oversee the fabrication in Nairobi. The installation was a mild steel frame filled with bundles of elephant grass, a material commonly used for thatching and animal feed.

What made the project particularly meaningful was that it was the first time I had worked creatively with my family and developed a project in my hometown. My role shifted constantly throughout the process: curator, designer, project manager, daughter, host, tea maker, and occasionally the person sweeping the floor at the exhibition.

I love how immediate exhibitions are. They're temporary, responsive and embodied. You get to witness people moving through the space and have conversations about the memories, stories and associations the space brings up for them.

Q. What is it about working with physical materials that inspires you?

Materials carry stories. They have origins, histories and relationships long before they arrive in a project. I'm interested in how materials can connect people to place and memory. I'm also interested in their sensory qualities, the way they feel, smell, reflect light or change over time.

The body understands things that language sometimes struggles to articulate. Materiality gives us access to that.

Q. What is the relationship between artist and viewer for you?

As a designer, I've learnt to step back a little. Once the work enters the world, it begins a relationship with the viewer/user that no longer belongs entirely to me. The work is only one half of the conversation. The other half is what the viewer brings to it. Leaving enough room for that exchange to happen is important, as it can fold back into new work. The relationship is a dialogue.

Q. How do you see your role as both an artist and a teacher?

I find teaching is about helping people recognise that they already have something valuable to contribute. Many students arrive looking for the right answer, but I'm more interested in helping them develop the confidence to ask better questions.

I try to be honest about my own vulnerabilities and uncertainties. Those were always the teachers and leaders I gravitated to most, the ones who created safe environments for fear and uncertainty and to discover the answers together.

Ultimately, I'm interested in helping students cultivate a strong sense of self. The strongest work tends to emerge when someone understands their own perspective and learns to trust it. Design decisions become much clearer when you know what you value and why.

Q. What’s been the hardest moment in your creative journey?

Joining the great resignation after six years of employment within architecture practices. Especially as someone who migrated here for better opportunities, it felt irrational from the outside. There wasn’t one dramatic incident. I was simply burnt out.

My body made the decision for me. What surprised me was how much of my identity and self-worth I had attached to that role. Therapy helped. So did the people around me who never made me feel strange for making that choice. When I told my mum and sister and they immediately supported me, it lifted a huge weight. The people around you matter.

The evidence for growth now is not waiting for a catastrophe before making a change you know is needed. It enabled me to redefine success in a way that included wellbeing, relationships and rest.

I'm still learning how to stay true to that and not chase achievements but fulfilment.

Q. What is the importance of storytelling in your life and work?

Stories help us locate ourselves. They tell us where we've come from, who we belong to and what we value. The objects we keep, the places we return to and the rituals we maintain all carry stories. Often those stories are what transform something ordinary into something meaningful. I think much of my work is really about creating opportunities for those stories to surface, be held and shared.

Q. When you think of home, what comes to mind?

Memory. The things you carry with you – a feeling or a conversation, the smell of freshly brewed Kenyan tea, a familiar laugh, a meal.

Home is less about permanence and more about relationships. So much of what we call home lives in memory, and I think we spend our lives finding ways to revisit, recreate and hold onto those moments.