Bolaji Teniola, SENTINEL, 2024, Various timber species, H 300 x W 310 x D 310 mm, photo by Sarah Forgie

Bolaji Teniola explores how to shape a sense of home by curating an exhibition that forms a chorus of creative object responses to cultural heritage and identity.

(A message to the reader.)

At the core of my creative practice lies a focus on the dialogue between hand and material, which, while allowing the process to dictate the outcome, often leads to my work blurring the lines between design, art, and craft. Depending on the project, I find myself either working comfortably with restrictions and limitations or operating in an open field of endless creative tangents whilst tethered by a key focus.

Working this way to reach a result is something I’ve developed over time, leading to an interest in the creation of an idea—the thoughts, moments, conversations, and investigations behind the objects we make and the process of making itself. As a first-gen immigrant, my view also shifts to the creation of an idea through the lens of culture and heritage,offering avenues for exploration and interrogation.

Having immigrated to Australia from Nigeria with my family as an infant, I don’t recall much from life prior to Australia, and despite being raised to appreciate and respect my culture, I often felt a disconnect, living between two cultures but not quite fitting into either. But still, there was a desire to connect.

This came to a head when I found myself wandering the halls of the British Museum in London and being overcome by a sense of unease that grew the further I went, reaching a boiling point at the exhibit of Nigerian artefacts. Being introduced to the history and knowledge of my ancestors via a colonial structure was jarring, opening my eyes to historical injustices committed via the theft of culturally significant artefacts.

Ruminating on the emotions from this experience gave rise to an abstract thought: What does the idea of home mean to you?

Settling on a concrete answer was difficult, but I came to understand that, as a creative practising in a global community, connecting and collaborating with other creatives to address this question would prove fruitful. So, the curatorial platform, Reflections Of Home (2024) was created and presented as part of Melbourne Design Week 2024 and with great assistance from Liz Zotti and support from Coco Flip, Ceres Fairwood, and the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Reflections Of Home brought together 20 contributors —a mix of Australian and international creatives —to interrogate this question, answering with objects, lighting, photography, and video. The collection of works ranged from functional to sculptural, from literal to metaphorical, and gave viewers a chance to question or reflect on their notions of ‘home’.

The plumes of smoke bellowing from within and wafting out of the box represented how I felt at the British Museum years earlier

My contribution was a piece titled Sentinel (2024), an incense box inspired by the tiled roofing of the Benin Kingdom’s palace. Adorned with jarrah, oregon, pine, silky oak, walnut, and white ash timber shingles, Sentinel’s domineering form evoked the figures on the lost-wax-cast brass plaques that once decorated the palace. The plumes of smoke bellowing from within and wafting out of the box represented how I felt at the British Museum years earlier, and, through research and the process of making, Sentinel became my attempt to connect with Nigerian craft, which offers a treasure trove of exploratory opportunities, thereby opening up a whole realm of possibilities for creation.

Reading on, you’ll learn about creation through the eyes of three other participants from the Reflections Of Home exhibition: Daphne Mohajer va Pesaran, an award-winning Iranian-Canadian designer and one-half of DnJ Paper, whose work explores paper as a poetic material for clothing and design, using paper as a non-woven textile, to produce garments and objects that question how complex communities of human and nonhuman beings might create together. Sandra Githinji, a Kenyan-Australian designer, curator, educator and current RMIT University Creative Practice PhD candidate, engages in relational, reparative, and multi-scalar processes across space and object-making. Finally, Melvin Josy, a Melbourne-based designer, originally from Kerala, India, working at the intersection of narrative, craft, and material exploration, investigates the histories, forms, and techniques of everyday objects and practices to uncover their cultural narratives and translates these insights into crafted designs.

Daphne Mohajer Va Pesaran

DNJ Paper, ZABUTON DOSHAK, 2024, Handmade Washi Paper , H 30 x W 420 x D 297 mm, photo by Sarah Forgie

My parents never moved while I was growing up, so I spent the first eighteen years of my life in the same home. It was a meeting point of cultures — a colonial red brick Canadian farmhouse with a fireplace, filled with Persian rugs collected by my Iranian parents. We had all kinds: flatweaves, Balouchi, Afshar, Isfahani, tribal rugs, practice rugs, prayer rugs and even a few Gabbeh rugs bought from IKEA in the 1990s.

Even though the house had beautiful hardwood floors, my parents thought it best to cover them with wool rugs to soften and warm each bare-footed step (always barefoot — my father could somehow hear from anywhere in the house if you entered with shoes on, and he would not abide it). They were precious to me, especially because my family was unable to return to Iran, so my only connection to our ancestral home was through their stories and precious objects like our rugs. Our house would not have been our home without these woven platforms for daily life.

Although our life in Canada was lived off the floor in the Western style — with tables, chairs, high counters, and beds — we sometimes ate in the Persian way, spreading a sofreh and sharing meals on the floor. Some of our friends even had a Persian-style living room, complete with scratchy woollen doshak (floor cushions made of thickly woven, ruglike textiles) where we could recline. As a child, this made perfect sense to me — why would anyone sit in a stiff chair when you could lie back after eating too much Ghormeh Sabzi?

Later, when I relocated to Japan, I was delighted to find a new life on the floor.

Later, when I relocated to Japan, I was delighted to find a new life on the floor. Large flat cushions called zabuton, often used with a floor chair called a zaisu, supported sitting for long periods, and there was even a heated table-blanket hybrid called a kotatsu that let you luxuriate for hours through the winter. Zabuton Doshak (2024) is a nod to floor life and a correspondence between these two cultures, blending inspiration from a tribal Afshar-style rug. Reminiscent of images of plants and animals encountered by the nomadic Afshar people during their journeys, which featured on their rugs, the cushion becomes a metaphor for nostalgia — a longing for one’s place of origin, especially for one that can no longer be returned to, with paper serving as the poetic medium for this feeling: it carries a message but remains ephemeral, like a dream.

Made from handmade Japanese washi produced by the Kurotani Washi Cooperative Association, Zabuton Doshak is first wrinkled into a supple paper cloth, known as momigami, cut into A3-sized sheets, and the Afshar rug pattern is then printed onto the surface. Next is drawing, inking, painting, and colouring with various media. Vital steps, as the nostalgia for a place of cultural origin can be likened to a crude drawing, an overlay, or an eager, aspirational approximation of reality. The final step was stitching it into a cushion and finishing it with the couching detail found on a zabuton. Zabuton Doshak tells a story of daily family life on the floor. The medium of paper allows for a poetic representation of nostalgia and memories of home that soften and wear away over time.

Dr Daphne Mohajer Va Pesaran is an Iranian Canadian academic and designer who specialises in sustainable fashion and textiles, focusing on the use of handmade paper for clothing in her research and design practice as a Senior Lecturer at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. Visit d-mvp.com and follow @daphne_mvp

Sandra Githinji

Around the world, people are being displaced by war, climate crisis, and rising hostility toward migrants. Even as borders harden, human lives remain marked by movement, hybridity and in-betweenness. Thinkers like Homi K. Bhabha, Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University describe this as a “migrant double vision”: the capacity to see home as both here and elsewhere, past and present.

It is within this terrain that I locate my own practice. As a Kenyan-Australian woman, I live with the ache of inheritances severed by coloniality, alongside the task of making home anew on unceded Wurundjeri land. My creative practice PhD at RMIT University grows out of this space of rupture and restoration. “Ro(o)utes” (2024), the textile work I shared in Reflections Of Home for Melbourne Design Week, gathers traces of labour, colonial rupture, and the everyday rituals that continue to bind us across distance and time.

The idea for “Ro(o)utes” surfaced when I stopped trying to represent Kenya and instead attended to what was already present in my life: tea. Since leaving Nairobi thirteen years ago, Kenyan tea has been a constant companion. Friends and family tuck packets into luggage for me when I cannot make the journey back. Tea becomes an infrastructure of belonging, sustained through care, especially in cold Melbourne winters.

My grandparents owned a small tea farm in central Kenya, their livelihood shaped by the steady rhythms of planting, harvesting and tending to the land. While their farm offered modest sustenance, it existed within a landscape marked by colonial extraction. Kenya is now the world’s third-largest exporter of tea. Its central province, once fertile with diversity, was seized and turned into vast plantations for export. What had been land of nourishment was reduced to monoculture. Thus, the simple act of drinking tea carries a dual weight: intimacy of family ritual and the shadow of colonial history.

It holds the small, repeated gestures that keep me, and many Kenyan diasporans, connected to homeland and memory.

Working with the material waste of tea bags, I dried and stitched them into panels, creating a tapestry that functions not as nostalgia, but as an active archive of practice. It holds the small, repeated gestures that keep me, and many Kenyan diasporans, connected to homeland and memory. When I put out a call on Instagram to gather used tea bags, a few Kenyan women responded, their contributions weaving their own traces of home into the work.

To thank them, and honour this shared act, I hosted a gathering in my home. We came together to share food, music, and conversation, with tea at the centre. This gathering became a living extension of the textile: an offering of gratitude, where memory and belonging were enacted, not only recalled. What began as a personal ritual unfolded into a collective practice.

In the creation of “Ro(o)utes”, home is both the first mark and the final step. It begins with embodied practice, tracing memory. It ends in gathering, placing that work in community, where others might see themselves reflected or begin their own remembering. Here, home is not a destination but creation, an ongoing labour of care, mutuality and relation.

Sandra Githinji is a Kenyan interdisciplinary designer, curator, and educator who leads her practice, Sandra Githinji Studio, and is based in Naarm (Melbourne), Australia. Visit sandragithinji.com and follow @sandra_githinji

Melvin Josy

Melvin Josy, DEMIGOD, 2024, Oak, Cotton, Brass Decoration, Imitation Gold Foil, H 300 x W 330 x D 150 mm, photo by Sarah Forgie

As an object designer, I am drawn to stories that spark my curiosity, shaping objects with forms and materials that stay true to these narratives. My practice explores the intersection of craft and contemporary design, examining both objects and the ways they are made — whether utilitarian, spiritual, or abstract — to understand how these practices evolve over time. I aim to create objects that challenge everyday assumptions and reflect on our relationship with culture, nature and belief. Through this approach, I seek to foster a material culture that is thoughtful, sustainable and emotionally resonant, creating objects that carry meaning through both making and experience.

“Demigod” (2024) is a sculptural totem that grew from remembrance — a longing to connect back to my roots and give form to something deeply familiar yet distant. The piece draws from Theyyam, a ritual art form from Kerala’s Malabar region, where performers transform into deities through elaborate costume, gesture and movement. I have always been captivated by how each form, colour and ornament carries fragments of collective memory — reflecting local folklores, legends and the socio-economic fabric of the communities that sustain this tradition.

The making of “Demigod” draws directly from the ritualised craft of Theyyam attire, which combines wood carving, metalwork and textiles

Through “Demigod”, I explore these layers of meaning, translating nostalgia and reverence into a contemporary interpretation that reflects both the tradition and my own creative perspective. The making of “Demigod” draws directly from the ritualised craft of Theyyam attire, which combines wood carving, metalwork and textiles, each executed with care and imbued with significance. In the sculpture, carved timber panels are joined and stitched with red cotton yarn, evoking both the colour and tactility of the ceremonial costumes.

Ghungroo beads threaded through the panels add a subtle auditory dimension, recalling the rhythm, movement, and music of the ritual. The process of shaping the timber, threading the yarn and looping the bells became a meditative, repetitive practice for me — mirroring the experience of the artisans and evoking the act of creating something sacred, a miniature embodiment of the deity. As the sculpture rocks gently, it becomes a small, living echo of the ritual — its movement, sound, and form carrying memory, rhythm and narrative into the space.

The piece is not only a homage to the intricacy and devotion of Theyyam, but also a personal meditation on how creation allows us to inhabit, understand and reinterpret the stories that shape us. In contemporary life, where functionality often eclipses symbolism, Demigod questions the distinction between the sacred and the everyday, reflecting how objects can carry memory, embody cultural identity, and hold intangible meanings embedded in their materials.

Melvin Josy is an object and furniture designer of Indian origin who employs a narrative-based approach to explore cross-cultural knowledge exchange, reinterpreting traditional Indian craft techniques with modern materials, and is currently based in Australia (having been an Associate at the JamFactory in Adelaide). Follow @melvin.josy

Epilogue

Reflections of Home was a celebration of the diversity of the creative industry and facilitated the sharing of ideas through various media from some of the best designers, artists, makers, craftspeople, and thinkers. Enabling a multitude of voices to weigh in confirmed that there is no singular answer to the provocation of home, but instead a chorus of ideas. As the creation of this idea became a collaborative endeavour, it made sense to include other voices in this Storylines contribution, for which we’re thankful, as part of Garland Magazine’s anniversary.

About Bolaji Teniola

Bolaji Teniola is an interdisciplinary designer practising in Tarntanya (Adelaide). With an Associate Degree in Furniture Design and a Bachelor of Industrial Design from RMIT University, Teniola blends the knowledge gained from these disciplines to develop pieces that sit at the intersection of art, craft, and design. Moved by intrigue and a fascination with materiality, stemming from experience gained working for design studios locally and abroad, Teniola finds joy in allowing the process to unearth pragmatic solutions, channelling these results to exhibitions and commissions. Follow @bolajiteniola

Tags

design | G41 | India | Iran | Kenya | Nigeria | safe harbour | second home