Minami Ivory
Counted, Graded, Numbered #23
Digital Photography
2022
Minami Ivory is a photographic and visual artist who resides in Tasmania, Australia. She was born in Hokkaido, Japan and moved to Australia at the age of 15. She currently teaches Art and Photography to secondary school students.
Her works are drawn from personal experiences and issues surrounding notions of identity. She is currently working on How Do I Bury You If I Don’t Have Your Body (2022 -).
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 frozen together in the cold, dark and quiet room like icy poles in the corner shop at night. 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 with 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 melted embryos made me shiver and mortified after every single negative result. I just obsessively continued the monthly embryo transfers, consuming my defrosted embryos, just to let it go through my uterus. 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.
