Emma Nishimura is a Japanese Canadian fine artist whose mediums include traditional etchings, archival pigment prints, drawings, audio pieces, and art installations; she is currently the Chair of Photography, Printmaking and Publications at the Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCAD). Nishimura’s work is pointed and poignant: she has embarked on a ten-year journey to tell her ancestors’ stories through visual art.
Her creations concentrate on memory, inherited narratives, as well as stories about and stemming from her Nikkei roots that allow her to incorporate her family history and identity into her artistic practices.
Nishimura began her visual journey charting her family’s history of internment over ten years ago by completing sewing patterns her bachan (grandmother) created during internment in Slocan, British Columbia: “From all of [the pattern books] I deduced that she was making garments for other people when she was in the camp. I knew that she sewed but I didn’t know where she went to school … her craftsmanship was so beautiful, and I knew I needed to do something with this box and all of these garments.” From here, Nishimura earned a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she deepened her knowledge of Japanese Canadian history while experimenting with installation-based arts and other forms of visual production.
Upon delving into her family archives, Nishimura discovered a trove of photo albums that she is now turning into photo etchings, which are then printed on handmade paper to create miniature furoshiki – Japanese wrapping cloth – these small sculptural works are part of an ongoing series that consists of hundreds of furoshiki installed on numerous shelves. Nishimura’s work beautifully ties back to her heritage: “The interesting thing about these [furoshiki] is that they are completely hollow, they look heavy, but when you pick them up they have no weight; what is the weight of memory and how much space does it take up, and how fragile is it? How can we share and preserve these stories? In addition to being hollow, the furoshiki also can’t be opened, so there’s a lot of futility in that too.”
“…what is the weight of memory and how much space does it take up, and how fragile is it? How can we share and preserve these stories?”
Emma Nishimura
In further exploration of her family history, Nishimura embarked on a “personal pilgrimage” to compile stories through mapping projects, starting with her relations and eventually broadening her scope to encompass members of the community: “I have this big mapping series and then people would say where is this camp? It was amazing because people were really connecting with it and wanting to place themselves in the story, too.” She now interviews members of the Japanese Canadian community and provides them with a space to share their family stories, which she then translates to visual art that also resemble furoshiki.
https://www.emmanishimura.com/an-archive-of-rememory
Nishimura’s work centres on key questions of how we package memories and thoughts to share them with future generations: “What gets passed down? What’s shared? What’s kept secret?” The furoshiki-like format also serves to facilitate the silences that accompany such questions, as the interviews are transcribed in a minuscule text that gives the impression of furoshiki from a distance, but up close it is revealed that the images are composed entirely of stories etched onto the cloth. The rationale for using furoshiki harkens back to Nishimura’s connections with her Nikkei ancestry: “I etch multiples of [the print] so each storyteller gets a print in return for sharing their story … the furoshiki form is utilitarian but it can also be used for gifts, so there’s a nice echoing of giving back.”
https://www.emmanishimura.com/baachans-patterns
The extension of Nishimura’s projects to include community members has allowed her to record stories of Japanese Canadians from different generations, from those who were interned to their children, as well as those who were born directly after the war and fourth-generation individuals. The box of patterns from Nishimura’s bachan has continued to be a central source of inspiration for her work because it is personally and historically meaningful for not only her own practice, but its impacts reverberate across the Japanese Canadian community in ways that allow them to be seen.
Nishimura asserts that we “create our own self-identity through our experiences, whether that is lived or inherited memory, and how much we revisit those memories over and over again to continue to cultivate that identity.” Emma Nishimura’s visual artistry are striking and necessary evocations of the Japanese Canadian community’s collective histories and the importance of keeping cultural memory alive.
Key Themes: Art as community, collective memory, visual art, family narratives, silence
Interview conducted by Shō Tanaka on June 11th, 2018.