Statement
Infertility causes great pain. Conceiving and giving birth to the child how and when you want to seems like a dream. Imagine if you didn’t have to give excuses to people about why you are not having a baby at that time. In the IVF lab, embryos are counted, graded and numbered like samples. They are stored together in the cold, dark and quiet room at night, having nothing to say. After every treatment, I would look and worry about every little symptom to see if I was still carrying that embryo. Or is that baby already dead? Maybe It’s already left my body. The train of thought continues day by day, night by night until the clinic rings up for the test result. During the IVF treatment, I felt emotionless, isolated and exhausted. How long was this dark tunnel going to continue? The unsettling thought of wasting away my defrosted embryos made me shiver and mortified after every single negative result. The aim of the journey became just to get to the end of it, not to carry the child. The journey became so painful that I just wanted it to be over.
Minami Ivory is a photographic and visual artist who resides in Launceston, Tasmania. She was born in Hokkaido, Japan and moved to Australia at the age of 15.
She completed the Bachelor of Contemporary Art and the Postgraduate Bachelor of Teaching at UTas. She currently teaches Art and Photography to high school students.
Minami has exhibited and been part of the group shows a handful of times in the past in Tasmania.
Her works are drawn from her personal experiences and her identity. She is currently working on two separate themes; Triangle People (2022 - ) and Where Do I Bury You If I Don't Have Your Body (2022 -).
Triangle People (2022 - ) explores the idea of one’s cultural identity, which changes over time from shifting between different cultures. In these works of series, Minami uses shapes in portrait and landscape images to express the confusion and disorientation of the global people.
Were Do I Bury You If I Don’t Have Your Body (2022 - ) intends to exhibit the journey from clinical, sterile IVF treatments and the initial pain this causes, to the overwhelming grief and pain of miscarriage and finally the expectation to move on and not come to terms with grief through a series of self-portraits and still life.