Congratulations to Sophie Constable, honoured with three awards this year for her artwork exploring the World War II experiences of Nikkei peoples.

Sophie received the Craft + Design Canberra ‘Emerging Contemporaries Exhibition Award’ and the National Association of Visual Artists (NAVA) Ignition Award for professional practice in 2024, at the Canberra Institute of Technology’s (CIT) Visual Art, Fashion Design, and Interior Design exhibition in November 2024.

The NAVA Ignition Award is given to a graduating student from university art and design schools, ‘who achieved the highest marks in their professional practice unit or who academic staff feel would be most deserving of the benefits offered by the prize – a one year NAVA Premium Membership package.’ These awards enable Sophie to exhibit in the Craft + Design Canberra‘s Emerging Contemporaries exhibition, to be held between February and April 2025.

Sophie was also awarded a 2024 Capital Arts Patrons’ Organisation All Insure Emerging Artist Award. This award will allow her to continue researching the lives of some of the Japanese people arrested and interned during WWII in Australia, and will also support the creation of artworks by Sophie and other artists collaborating in the When You Call My Name project.

Sophie’s artworks are primarily digitally quilted portraits and hand woven kori (Meiji era suitcases). Both the kori and the portraits integrate images of people with Japanese ancestry, who were in Australia, USA, and Canada during WWII. The works stitch and weave together ‘diverse materiality, bringing historical Nikkei narratives and the present day together in vivid colours, organic lines and interwoven textures’, explains Sophie.

These works were exhibited at Canberra Institute of Technology’s (CIT) Visual Art, Fashion Design, and Interior Design exhibition in November, presented at the Past Wrongs Future Choices international conference in Banff, Canada in mid-November, and was also exhibited in South Korea in October 2024.