Tamiko Nimura

Public Remembrance Project

“1000 Waves Goodbye”

(Cotton Thread on Reclaimed Child’s Kimono, 2026 – 27)

“1000 Waves Goodbye” is an ongoing public art project honoring loss, created by visual artist Teruko Nimura in response to her sister Tamiko’s memoir A Place For What We Lose: A Daughter’s Return to Tule Lake (University of Washington Press, 2026). 

We (the Nimura sisters) invite participants to honor a lost loved one by filling out a form and tracing their hands onto the form. Teruko will stitch the contributed name and hand silhouette into a community tapestry. We will compile a bound directory of the forms as well.

From Teruko:

“My sister Tamiko asked that I create a kind of community altar where people can honor their lost loved ones as she travels around the region at book signings and author talks among other things. At each event we have been collecting the silhouettes of participants hands, their names, and names of their lost loved ones. I then stitch those hands onto a vintage deconstructed girl’s kimono in circles radiating from the place where her heart would have been when worn using a simple hand stitch inspired by the Japanese mending technique sashiko.“

This ongoing project will follow Tamiko’s book tour, each location represented by collected handprints. So far handprints have been collected from Tacoma, Seattle, Olympia, Edmonds (all in Washington State) and Tule Lake, California.