Weaving Memory, Land, and Care: An Interview with Sophie Constable—Part 1

This interview was originally published in Discover Nikkei, the online journal of the Japanese American National Museum.

By Kristie Valdez-Guillen

Finding a time to meet Sophie Constable felt less like scheduling an interview and more like initiating a crossing—a movement through time zones, seasons, and epistemic worlds. Nineteen hours apart, suspended between daylight savings grogginess and the gentle insistence of our shared curiosity, we entered a conversation that unfolded as a kind of trenza: a braid of memory, land, story, and responsibility.

Sophie, trained as a veterinarian and shaped by an intuitive artistic practice, works in the borderlands where science, memory, and care meet. Her pieces—fiber-based kori, embroidered portraits, and woven maps of prewar trade—invite viewers to consider Nikkei history not as a closed chapter, but as a living relationship that continues to shape the present. She approaches Australian Nikkei history not as an archive to mine, nor as a cultural terrain to claim expertise over, but as a living relationship that requires patience, positionality, and a willingness to be transformed.

Her practice is grounded in a decolonial ecology, one that honors the land, the body, and the materials themselves as vessels of meaning. She works as a settler witness who refuses the colonial comfort of distance. Each piece she creates asks a quiet but insistent question:

How do we hold memory that does not belong to us—but still calls us toward responsibility?

Our conversation drifted across continents and disciplines—horsehair trade routes, silenced family histories, wartime ruptures, and the slow ethics of staying in spaces where one could easily walk away. Throughout, Sophie returned to the materials themselves: cane, silk, paper, wool, mulberry leaves, photographs softened by time. In her hands, these materials become not metaphors but testigos—witnesses to journeys, erasures, and fragile kinships that stretch across oceans.

This interview is an invitation to linger in those textures. To sit with the memories her work refuses to let disappear. To consider, with her, how art might reweave what was fractured by war, racism, and the long afterlives of empire.

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Kristie Valdez-Guillen (KVG): First of all, congratulations on being recognized for all your recent work on Nikkei histories. You won three awards in 2024! Let’s begin with how you first became interested in Japanese Australian and Nikkei histories. What drew you to explore those stories through visual and fiber art?

Sophie Constable (SC): It really started during my PhD fieldwork in veterinary science. I was working with remote Aboriginal communities in Australia—one of them just outside Broome in Western Australia. During trips in and out of Broome, I spent time in a local bookshop and came across Noreen Jones’s book Number Two Home. It had this striking black-and-white photo on the cover. I love history, so I picked it up, realized it was about Japanese settlers in Australia—and I put it back down.

Immediately I thought, “Whoa, why did I do that?” If it had been about Chinese or Afghan Australian history, I would have bought it. I asked myself if this was something inherited from my grandfather, who had fought in the war and was deeply affected by that experience; for example, he would never buy anything Japanese. That moment sparked a deeper curiosity. So, I made myself buy the book.

Reading it blew me away. I hadn’t known about the internment, deportations, or even the prewar Japanese presence in Australia at all, really. The wholesale internment and deportations felt completely illogical to me, maybe because of my multilingual upbringing, and I needed to understand more. It felt like part of a wider story our society needs to engage with.

That led me to Unwanted Aliens by Yuriko Nagata—an incredible foundational text in this field. Around that time, I was writing creatively to make sense of things. I was invited to a creative panel at Nikkei Australia’s first conference in 2014—even though they hadn’t met me. It was such a generous gesture. That space and those stories really grabbed my heart. I’m still working with them today.

KVG: What drew you to visual and fiber art as a way of engaging with those histories?

SC: Firstly, it was a language and a space I could use to think through my understanding, notice details, and see what was missing from my understanding. Then, when I was presenting some research introducing a friend’s Nikkei family history, I experimented with different ways of engaging people with those experiences: participatory art, historic photographs, and oral history. I loved the historic photographs—coming face to face with someone’s photo in an archive is so rare and special to me—but my focus group found them the least engaging.

Then I started to wonder whether I could work with the photographs in my art practice both as a way of exploring my understanding of a family’s memories and as a way to help others see them too. The kori, too, I felt—being so absorbing for me—might also be a way to invite others to think about these experiences and what they tell us about identity, society, and humanity.

Both of those series use fibrework to draw on those concepts of entanglement and interwovenness, the everyday nature of fabric as well as its nostalgic ties to other spaces, the needle as creator, repairer, and piercer, and the multiple threads that connect and form us. I find it a language that resonates with the ideas I’m interested in and sparks interesting new paths to explore.

KVG: Can you tell us more about the materiality of your kori? What are they made from, and how do the portraits function within the piece?

SC: Mine are made from cane. In Japan, they are made from willow, bamboo, cane—many different materials—but I ended up working with cane. Over the cane, I stitched sleeves made from found or symbolic materials connected to each person’s life story and journey. That materiality becomes part of the self and part of the story.

Each kori includes a passport-style photo or a family picture, surrounded by fabric or items referencing the person’s journey. It invites people to wonder who the piece is about and where they might have traveled. When I was explaining this to my class, I said, when we live somewhere—just by breathing, eating, and being—the carbon and nitrogen of that place become part of us. And we become part of that place.

That idea of interconnection deeply informs my work. So it’s working on that concept of weaving that place-based materiality into the suitcase, which becomes sort of an embodiment of journeys and our selves through a lifetime—all the different places that form part of you.

KVG: Your kori are so striking and haunting. They look like something a person left behind, imbued with life and story.

SC: Some are still with their original families, but I first experienced them during a Past Wrongs, Future Choices project in Canada. We toured sites of wartime incarceration and museums with people who had lived through that history. The kori kept appearing in those spaces. They mesmerized me. When I looked back at photos from Australia and Brazil, I noticed them there too.

Each suitcase represented a life uprooted—everything a person could carry when moved. In Australia, some were left behind when the owner passed away during incarceration. Here, many older people from tropical areas were interned in cold, crowded facilities, some becoming ill and dying. If they didn’t have next of kin, their belongings were left behind. The memory of their lives has often been left behind too by Australian society.

The kori became a symbol for me of those processes. They made me think of the social threat inherent in the phrase “unidentified baggage will be removed and destroyed,” the assumption of danger and necessity for publicly visible, officially sanctioned identities, contrasting with the feeling of the preciousness and the private nature of my own baggage—physical and emotional.

And being made of cane means the kori don’t last forever—they need to be rewoven to keep holding those stories. So, like Pacific textiles and Japanese shrines, the object itself becomes like a temporary conduit that each generation makes the choice about whether they want to keep those stories going and how.

KVG: The impermanence of the cane reminds me of one of your recent works. I noticed an intricate weaving of threads and trade materials—can you tell me what story you were trying to tell through that piece?

SC: That was my attempt at physically weaving together the story of families engaged in prewar trade between Australia and Japan. Each thread was made of a different trade item—such as paper, silk, wool, horsehair, or metal. Each line represented a journey between the two countries.

KVG: So, are you saying the warp threads are like trade routes?

SC: Kind of—but rather than just vertical lines, it forms an X. The southern ends of the threads represent Australian ports, and the northern ends represent Japanese ports. Goods traveled back and forth across these lines. But more than just trade, these journeys created the social fabric—people met, married, raised children between countries. Their lives were shaped by these crossings.

What I’d like to do with that loom is scale it up, make it physically larger, and then show what happens to that social fabric when war disrupts it, maybe look at reparative techniques as well.

KVG: As a non-Nikkei artist (and I’m also not Nikkei), how do you navigate the responsibility of representing histories outside your lived experience? I sense so much of your thoughtfulness and empathy across your projects.

SC: I think about this a lot. When I entered this space, I was also working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. I was thinking through ideas of how my presence as an academic must be balanced in terms of give and take, not simply be extractive. I was acutely aware of the damage that can be done by an outsider—even just their presence being triggering, even trying to understand can be hurtful in the way that you do it.

I felt that if I was going to be retraumatizing someone, or appropriating something, or stealing someone’s story, then I should not be in that space. But at the same time, to just ignore the history wasn’t good enough, because that kind of meant walking away.

I remember losing so much sleep over this. I think of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s work—how to form bonds that don’t destroy our neighbors or ourselves. I knew I have the privilege of being able to walk away, but I also felt that’s what’s been happening for too long.

So I decided to stay uncomfortable. If I’m comfortable, I interrogate that. I move slowly, stay in dialogue, listen for resistance. I try to respect when it’s not the right time, not the right context, that I’m not the right person.

That awareness came from my own experience, too. Whenever I tried to ask my granny about her wartime experience, she would just cry. We never managed to talk about it. That silence was her truth. I had to honor that.

Read Part 2

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Dr. Sophie Constable is an academic artist and scholar researching the history of Nikkei peoples in the Pacific alongside community engagement with Nikkei histories. Her work spans education, art, and museum sectors. Sophie’s connection to Nikkei contexts is not through her ancestry, but through common social fabrics in which she sees members of society as emmeshed together, their histories interwoven and tugging on each other.

Currently, she is a doctoral researcher in the School of Culture, History and Language at the Australian National University. Her PhD investigates how art shapes transwar remembrance of Nikkei relationality across Australia and Tonga.

All photos supplied by Sophie Constable