Minami Ivory

This image is from an ongoing series which visually communicates my personal journey through the clinical, sterile IVF treatments and the physical and mental pain of this process.

In the lab, embryos are counted, graded and numbered like samples. They’re stored frozen together in the dark and quiet room like icy poles in the corner shop at night. In every embryo transfer, the ‘baby’ was thawed and simply slid down the tube into my uterus.

Throughout the fertility treatments, I just obsessively continued to swallow my defrosted embryos. The aim of the journey became obscure. Mindlessly and compulsively, I consumed the embryos like bitterly cold icy poles. It became so painful that I just wanted it to be over