In Minami Ivory’s photographs, bodies are present yet held back—measured, veiled, interrupted. Faces are sometimes obscured; gestures pause before action; surfaces carry evidence of handling and restraint. The images do not ask to be decoded quickly. They ask for time.
In an era saturated with confessional imagery, that refusal of immediacy becomes its own kind of statement. Ivory does not use her camera to disclose, but to withhold. Her work transforms silence from a void into a potent language, and absence into a deliberate aesthetic strategy. Across her practice, the body appears not as a site of expression or confession, but as a surface acted upon by systems—medical, linguistic, procedural, and social—that impose order while refusing completion. Rather than narrating experience directly, Ivory constructs images that remain deliberately incomplete, insisting that uncertainty itself is a condition worth attending to.
Born in Japan and now living and working in Lutruwita/Tasmania, Ivory has spoken of how cultural displacement and linguistic distance shaped her relationship to images. Moving from Hokkaido to Australia—and inhabiting English before it fully belonged to her—sharpened her awareness of what escapes language altogether. Photography emerged not as a tool of explanation, but as a parallel mode of thinking: one capable of holding experiences that resist articulation. In her practice, the image does not translate feeling into clarity; it sustains ambiguity without dissolving it.
Ivory trained in art and teaching at the University of Tasmania and works across photography, collage, and surface intervention. In 2024, she presented her first solo exhibition at Sawtooth ARI, Invermay. In 2025 her work continued to circulate through exhibitions and selections including Within and Summer Salon at Poimena Art Gallery, Launceston; Go Orange for Muscular Dystrophy at Madeline Gordon Gallery, Launceston; and shortlisted projects for the PhMuseum Photography Grant presented at PhotoVogue Festival, Milan. This growing visibility has not altered the tenor of the work. If anything, it has sharpened its refusal of spectacle.
Central to her practice is a rejection of easy narrative. Where many photographic approaches lean toward revelation, confession, or dramatic exposure, Ivory’s images remain measured—their surfaces dense with material labour, their subjects often partial, veiled, or structurally constrained. Her photographs sit at the intersection of body, procedure, and image, where systems of evaluation, memory, and containment become visible not through closure, but through sustained suspension. Looking is slowed. Meaning accumulates without resolution.
Two bodies of work—Counted, Graded, Numbered and Weapon of Choice—offer the clearest articulation of this approach. Though formally distinct, both examine how systems assign value, manage bodies, and enforce silence through procedures that present themselves as neutral. In each, the body is present but never dominant: measured, obscured, fragmented, or rendered partial. What emerges is not disclosure, but endurance.
When I couldn’t speak English well, art became a way to belong. It gave me a common language, and I developed my visual language much faster than spoken language.
Counted, Graded, Numbered
This body of work is grounded in Ivory’s personal experience of IVF, drawing directly on the clinical language, repetitive procedures, and systems of assessment that structure reproductive medicine. Rather than illustrating this experience, the work absorbs its logic. Belonging here is procedural. Language is administrative. Time is measured not by progression, but by repetition.
Counted, Graded, Numbered is organised around classification and control. The title borrows the language of laboratory administration—language that promises objectivity while flattening complexity. Across the series, Ivory’s body appears repeatedly in states of suspension: lying, holding, waiting. The gestures are minimal. The compositions are restrained. Nothing in the images signals climax or progress. Meaning accumulates through duration rather than outcome.
In Counted, Graded, Numbered #13 (2022), the artist lies on a white surface, her body angled slightly to one side, her head tilted back. Her gaze drifts upward, unfixed. In her open palm she holds two egg-shaped objects—pale, semi-translucent, irregular in form. Their surfaces catch light unevenly, dense in places, softer in others. The image resists symbolism. It insists instead on material presence.
The hand is relaxed rather than gripping. The objects are not consumed or activated; they are held. Their doubled presence is central. They exist not as a promise of outcome, but as counted units—plural entities subject to anticipation and repetition. The image stages suspension rather than action. Stillness here is not an absence of labour; it is its condition. The photograph records endurance without resolution.
In Counted, Graded, Numbered #24 (2022), the frame tightens. The image isolates the mouth and hand, foregrounding a transparent cylindrical form held to the lips. Within the clear surface, jagged eggshell fragments are embedded in dense white material. The object’s edges are sharp; its transparency is undermined by internal obstruction. The mouth approaches, but does not ingest.
The photograph halts at the threshold of action. Consumption is implied but withheld. The shells—normally discarded—are preserved, immobilised, rendered inseparable from the object itself. What should be processed remains fixed. The image records proximity, strain, and compulsion without release.
In Counted, Graded, Numbered #79 (2022), the body is reduced to a fragment. A section of upper thigh and hip fills the frame against a deep black background. Beneath sheer hosiery, an egg-shaped presence presses outward, deforming the fabric. The form is contained but insistent, neither fully visible nor concealed.
Here, the object is not held or approached; it is accommodated. The fabric functions as a tenuous membrane, the body as intermediary. There is no gesture of control—only sustained negotiation. The image collapses distinctions between inside and outside, registering endurance as a condition of bearing rather than action.
A shift occurs in Counted, Graded, Numbered #40 (2023). The artist appears in three-quarter profile against a plain, softly lit background. Translucent green plastic tubing is wound repeatedly around her head and neck, layered across eyes, jaw, and throat. Vision is restricted not by force, but by accumulation. A length of tubing trails away, emphasising excess rather than closure.
The contrast between the clinical green of the tubing and the bright pink garment sharpens the image’s procedural logic. The body remains upright, composed, still. Regulation occurs gradually and persistently. Containment accrues over time. What unsettles is not compression, but normalisation.
Weapon of Choice
Structured around denial rather than procedural endurance, Weapon of Choice examines how violence is displaced, fragmented, and structurally refused representation. Revisiting a summer from Ivory’s adolescence marked by violence, the work returns to trauma, survival, and the forms of agency that emerge through restraint rather than depiction. Collage, text, and spatial fragmentation enter the work, yet the commitment to withholding remains. Violence is never shown. Its consequences are registered through absence.
In Weapon of Choice: The River Was Roaring (2024), angular red and blue planes intersect with fragmented photographic traces—water, grass, distant structures. A partial arm floats beneath overlapping layers. The river is not depicted directly; its presence is implied through pressure rather than scene. Orientation collapses. Fragmentation replaces coherence.
In Weapon of Choice: It Was All Well Planned (2023), handwritten text appears across a densely patterned red surface. The sentence—“Without saying a word the juveniles carried my empty body under the bridge”—asserts an event without illustrating it. The handwriting is uneven, insistent. The photograph refuses corroboration. Language bears the weight of experience while the image withholds confirmation.
In Weapon of Choice: He Denied It All (2025), a torn photograph is suspended against a calm seascape. Two vertical halves fail to align, separated by a jagged tear. One fragment conceals the figure behind patterned fabric; the other reveals only part of a turned head and shoulder. The landscape remains continuous and indifferent. Denial appears as structural fracture—damage without confrontation.
In Weapon of Choice: Curiosity Killed the Cat (2024), a figure stands beside a turquoise bicycle at night. The body is partially illuminated; the head disappears into darkness and foliage. The floral dress and empty basket remain visible. Risk is named in the title, not shown in the image. The moment suspends before outcome.
Across Weapon of Choice, language and fragmentation do not clarify meaning; they delimit it. Absence becomes force. The refusal to depict violence is not evasion, but position.
Across both projects, Ivory’s practice is defined by consistency rather than repetition. Her use of her own body is neither confessional nor performative. It is procedural. The body appears as something acted upon rather than something that acts. Agency emerges not through expression, but through endurance.
Objects remain intact. Language interrupts without explaining. Time accumulates without closure. The viewer is asked not to empathise through spectacle, but to remain with uncertainty.
This restraint is not a lack of care; it is precision. Every gesture is measured. Every omission is active. Experiences that do not resolve cleanly—those that remain counted, graded, numbered, or denied—are allowed to persist without repair.
Fourteen
The first thing Fourteen withholds is a face. A young figure looks directly toward the camera, shoulders bare, posture intact, their features blocked by a thick application of white paint. The gesture is neither dramatic nor expressive. It does not invite interpretation so much as it refuses it. From its opening image, Minami Ivory’s small, quietly insistent zine establishes a condition rather than a story: a way of looking without being permitted to recognise.
Published as the inaugural release in CCP.PE.ZINE, a collaborative publishing initiative by the Centre for Contemporary Photography and Perimeter Editions, Fourteen is modest in scale and deliberate in its restraint. The series is dedicated to concise, project-specific publications by emerging photographic artists, privileging focus over summary. Ivory’s contribution understands this economy instinctively. The book does not attempt to introduce her practice or explain its origins. Instead, it concentrates a set of visual gestures—painting over faces, compressing space, interrupting photographic description—that accumulate across the pages with a measured, quietly unsettling logic.
The title refers to an age and to a threshold. Fourteen stems from Ivory’s wider and ongoing series Weapon of Choice, which revisits the trauma she experienced during adolescence. Yet the zine resists narration. There is no chronology, no confessional arc, no attempt to translate experience into resolution. Rather than recounting events, Ivory addresses unspoken subjects through colour, pose, memory, and mark making, allowing silence and withholding to function as structural conditions of the work, rather than themes to be illustrated.
The cover sets the terms with clarity. A black-and-white portrait fills the frame. The subject faces forward; hair, neck, and shoulders remain visible, while the face is completely obscured by thick white paint. The application is blunt and uneven, denying expression without erasing presence. It is not decorative, nor symbolic in any obvious sense. It establishes erasure as a practical condition—something done to the image rather than performed by it. When the same image reappears on the back cover, now overlaid with publication details, anonymity becomes inseparable from institutional framing and authorship.
Inside, Fourteen offers no captions or titles to guide the reader. Images relate to one another through repetition, gesture, and surface intervention rather than narrative sequence. Faces recur as sites of erasure. Paint interrupts photographic clarity without fully cancelling presence. What remains visible—hands, posture, clothing, fragments of environment—takes on disproportionate weight, asked to carry meaning in the absence of identity.
One image shows two figures standing before a large window overlooking a winter cityscape. Snow gathers on distant rooftops beyond the glass. Their faces are covered in pale paint, while their hands remain visible, raised in casual peace-sign gestures. The contrast is quietly disarming. Familiar signs of youth persist even as identity is obscured, producing a tension between habit and enforced anonymity. The city outside feels present yet unreachable, flattened by distance and cold.
Another isolates a single figure in a school uniform against a pared-back background. The face is covered in flat green paint, echoed by blocks of colour pressing into the surrounding space. A finger points outward, suspended mid-gesture. Without text to stabilise interpretation, the image resists portraiture. It does not ask who this person is. Instead, it stages the act of address itself—speech without voice, recognition without identity.
Elsewhere, a body lies stretched across a bed. The figure is rendered with photographic clarity, while the surrounding room has been heavily overpainted in dark, muddy tones. The body remains exposed, but the space that should contain it collapses into opacity. Intimacy is suggested but not offered; vulnerability is present without reassurance. The image holds the viewer in a state of proximity without comfort or release.
One of the most restrained images appears on the back cover: the face fully obscured in white. Here, the intervention is quieter, the surrounding space less agitated. Silence becomes palpable—not as absence, but as something imposed and lived with. Ivory has said that silence became her shield: not a retreat, but a means of surviving systems that leave the vulnerable ill-equipped to confront harm. In this image, silence registers materially, as a surface that both protects and isolates.
Across Fourteen, the repeated acts of covering faces, blocking space, and compressing environments do not aestheticise erasure. They insist on limits—on what images can show and on what viewers expect to access. The book does not move toward catharsis. It does not offer clarity in exchange for endurance. Its coherence lies in restraint, in the slow, deliberate accumulation of gestures that refuse to resolve.
Small books create a private space between the reader and the work. Covering faces began as protection, and became a way of speaking about silence and censorship.
The physical form of the publication is integral to its effect. At 14.8 by 21 centimetres, saddle-stitched and unassuming, Fourteen asks to be held close. The pages offer little resistance in the hand. The absence of explanatory text places responsibility with the reader, encouraging a slower, more attentive engagement. This is not a work that demands interpretation; it asks for presence rather than comprehension.
Read alongside Weapon of Choice, Fourteen does not function as an appendix or preliminary sketch. It operates as a compressed core—a place where the ethical and formal concerns of Ivory’s practice are held in suspension. Where other works expand through accumulation and visual density, this zine pares back, allowing silence and surface to do their work.
What Fourteen finally offers is not understanding, but endurance: the uneasy recognition that some experiences cannot be clarified without being diminished, and that looking—when stripped of certainty—carries its own responsibility.
Much of this restraint is not theoretical but lived. In conversation, Ivory describes photography as a language she arrived at before words fully belonged to her—one shaped by displacement, silence, and the need to survive without explanation. What emerges in the interview is not a counterpoint to the work, but its condition: silence as protection, withholding as care, and making as a way to continue rather than resolve. The photographs do not illustrate these experiences; they absorb them.
My practice is process-driven and intuitive. Art became a visual language for me when spoken language failed, and through making—cutting, layering, painting, withholding—I can hold experiences without needing to explain or resolve them. — MINAMI IVORY
You were born in Hokkaido and now live in Lutruwita/Tasmania. How has that distance — geographic and cultural — shaped the way you see and photograph the world?
Hokkaido is similar to Lutruwita/Tasmania in a way; it’s a large island with wildness and farming industries. Both islands were colonised in the 1800s. They are the coldest state/prefecture in their respective countries, and life is slower and quieter, especially in winter. There is a sense of isolation in both islands. I go back to Hokkaido at least once a year, and I live in Lutruwita/Tasmania most of the time, working full time and raising three children with my husband. We converse in English and some Japanese, we embrace both Western and Japanese cultures, and we live in this beautiful bubble of mixture at home.
Most of the time, I don’t feel like I belong anywhere, and that reflects in my artwork. My work feels like I’m an outsider, looking into Japanese culture, sometimes being over-critical. I also feel really awkward creating anything to do with Australian culture, feeling paranoid that my Australia is different from the real one. It’s the concept of the third culture — people who develop their own cultural identity by moving between two cultures over time. Moving between these two islands has definitely shaped me differently than if I had stayed in Japan, and I strongly believe that this is quite apparent in my work.
When did you first feel that photography could express what language could not?
When I attended high school in Tasmania, I couldn’t speak English very well and struggled to adjust to life in a small town in isolation. Back then, the internet wasn’t very accessible in Tasmania, and I couldn’t even find a computer at school that could type in Japanese, so it was difficult to email friends or family in Japan. There weren’t any streaming services either, so I listened to the same music on my MiniDiscs that I had brought from Japan over and over.
Of course, I connected with Western music and movie culture as well, but sometimes I just wanted a break from trying to understand everything that was being said or sung, before I could fully absorb it. When someone moves to a place where they are not fluent in the culture or language, it feels like their whole identity is stripped away. You become an alien whom people misunderstand, and things you were once proud of mean nothing on a new planet.
To come back to the question: when I was struggling as an international student in Tasmania and counting the days until I finished Year 12 and could return to Japan, I enrolled in an art class. When I stepped into the art room, I felt a sense of belonging. Art provided an opportunity for me to be on the same stage as local students — we had a common language called visual language. Art had always been in my life in some way, but that was when I truly felt connected to it and developed my visual language rapidly, much faster than English. I am probably more fluent in visual language than in Japanese or English. I think everyone comes with different language skills, and this was mine. Without a doubt, art can express many themes and feelings that other languages cannot. I know I’m talking about art rather than photography specifically, but that’s when I really understood what visual language could communicate.
You originally studied painting before turning to photography. What elements of that early training still inform the way you make images today?
For me, photography strives for technique, perfection, and accuracy. It feels more like craftsmanship or a scientist’s work. Painting, on the other hand, is intuitive, emotion-driven, and seeks happy accidents. I know this can be the opposite for many other artists, depending on the imagery they create, but that’s how it works in my practice.
While I strive for strong imagery in photography and continue to practise in the studio and darkroom, I must say that the moment my painting philosophy marries my photography practice, my work really shines. When I see imperfection in my photographs, I feel that it’s an opportunity. I love exploring composition through layering, cutting, gluing, and painting as a way of understanding my work more deeply.
Your practice moves between analogue and digital, collage and paint. What happens in the moment when a photograph becomes something you need to alter, touch, or rework?
I quite often take self-portrait images, and I’m usually alone in the studio. The camera might be in focus or out of focus, intentionally or accidentally. When I take a self-portrait, I let go of fear and become absorbed in the process, which feels very similar to painting. Most of my work stems from personal experience, but it connects to broader, more universal ideas.
I choose subjects that move me strongly at that moment in my life, because emotion drives my creative practice. Revisiting emotion and expressing it in front of the camera becomes the most important aspect, so the work is very process-driven. Manipulating images after printing is simply an extension of what I do in photography. I move continually between different mediums until the image feels complete or resolved, although there are certain photographs I decide not to alter.
When you intervene in an image — by cutting, layering, or painting — does it feel more like protection or revelation?
I don’t think very much when I’m adding layers to my images. It’s intuitive, and the process can go on for hours. I lay out many images on the floor and have numerous old photographs and darkroom prints in my studio. I love going through them, putting things together — that’s the fun part.
Taking self-portraits for Weapon of Choice definitely revealed raw feelings, and sometimes I needed to keep those to myself, so that part felt like protection. Most of the time, though, it’s revelation. I’m returning to moments or memories through words and mark-making, and I discover new perspectives on my work and myself.
In Weapon of Choice, you return to the summer you were fourteen. How did this project begin, and what did you learn by revisiting that memory through art?
The trauma from that summer stayed with me for a long time. I didn’t know what to do with it. I spoke to counsellors a few times but never really felt connected. When I was at art school, I considered working on it in my final year, but I was unable to produce any work. I couldn’t even begin to think of composition or ideas — I was too young to understand it all. I was twenty, and it had only been six years since that summer; I hadn’t processed what had really happened.
When I began revisiting that summer through photography in 2023, it felt easy. Ideas and compositions came to me every day, even in my dreams, and there was no stopping. Some concepts can only be executed successfully with life experience, just as some works can only be created when one is young. The first year of working on this series was very tough. Some photoshoots triggered breakdowns, but I continued. It was one of the best things I’ve ever done in my life.
The title carries both tenderness and defiance. What, for you, is the “weapon” in this work — the camera, the act of remembering, or something else entirely?
In this series, “weapon” refers to something humans use for survival or protection — not physically, but metaphorically. After being exposed to violence during my summer holiday in 2001, I relied on luck and strength to escape and reclaim my life. Everyone carries some kind of weapon, and it can be used positively or negatively. Ultimately, we only have ourselves to keep our lives moving forward.
I believe the juveniles involved had nothing but violence as a means of survival. My mother chose silence and simply being present to keep us together that summer. Now, I use the act of creating as my weapon of choice — it allows me to stand up and gives my life meaning. Sometimes, someone’s weapon of choice is simply getting up in the morning: a will to live.
My feelings were never settled. I don’t make work to release them—I make work to settle unresolved feelings
You combine fragments of girlhood — notebooks, cartoon motifs, and school ephemera — with darker imagery. What do these juxtapositions reveal about how we remember and reconstruct innocence?
Media in the 1990s was different. Explicit and suggestive material appeared on television openly. Japan is still somewhat behind in censoring explicit material in everyday life; adult magazines are casually displayed in convenience stores, and my heart still races when my children walk past them. I remember my body burning when I saw those magazine covers in bookshops, and seeing stickers advertising adult services in phone boxes.
Things are different now, but girls are still exposed to these things at a young age. There is always darkness alongside innocence. Girls at that age can also be cruel — it’s a time when someone can be both beautiful and cruel at once. We’re often surprised by that contrast when we shouldn’t be. Children are experimenting with emotion and testing boundaries, and some experience darkness without understanding it fully. It felt natural to combine girlhood with darker imagery in my work.
Counted, Graded, Numbered transforms the sterile language of IVF into something tactile and human. How did you find the visual language for such a private and clinical experience?
I often wonder why I’m publicly sharing such personal experiences instead of talking to a counsellor on a very soft couch. The reason is that infertility is universal. I want to reach people with similar experiences so they don’t feel alone and can open up about it.
Medical environments appear sterile, but patients often experience vulnerability and invasion. There is a lot of physical fluid involved, which we rarely imagine. My photography needed to express that discomfort — the invasive, unpleasant reality of clinical experiences and the sense of bodily intrusion.
Did making those photographs bring a sense of release, or did it reopen feelings you thought had settled?
My feelings were never settled. I create art to settle unresolved feelings.
Your zine, Fourteen, feels intimate and deliberate — almost like a private diary. What story does it tell, and why did you choose this smaller, physical form?
I’ve always loved small books. When I imagine the photobook for Weapon of Choice, a small scale feels right. Small books create intimacy and a private space between the reader and the work. The zine consists largely of painted photographs from my old albums. Revisiting images from my teenage years allowed me to uncover feelings I hadn’t noticed before, though some images were very difficult to look at.
Covering the girls’ faces began as a way to protect identities after losing contact, but it evolved into something broader. I realised that societal censorship often shields predators while leaving victims voiceless and faceless. Through colour, pose, memory, and mark-making, the zine addresses unspoken experiences. These figures become faceless individuals in crowds whose potential has been stifled. Despite progress in addressing stigma, inadequate sex education leaves many vulnerable. Silence becomes a shield — voices muted by fear and systems that fail them. I want to challenge society to imagine and act differently.
Most of the time I don’t feel like I belong anywhere, and that reflects in my work. Moving between cultures shaped me differently
Living and working in Tasmania, away from the mainland’s art centres, how does that isolation affect your pace, perspective, and sense of quiet in the work?
When I began photography, submitting to organisations like CCP felt natural because that’s where I saw photography happening. I didn’t know where to start in Tasmania, and I’m glad I threw myself into the mainland circuit. Today, submissions are largely online, though they can be expensive, so I’ve become more selective.
I do wish I lived in Melbourne, especially when I see exhibitions or workshops online. Melbourne is close, but visiting a few times a year doesn’t feel like enough. Still, Tasmania is home to my family and gives me comfort. Living in a slow, quiet place allows me to look inward more often. As long as I can move between inside and outside worlds, I can live in a small town and feel fulfilled.
Silence appears throughout your images — as atmosphere, emotion, and resistance. How do you think about silence in your photography?
There is a deafening silence in my work — it’s so quiet it’s loud. In my hometown of Sapporo, it snows for about six months a year, and it gets dark around 4 pm. My fondest memories are of snow. Walking through snow at night, silence takes over the world. The mind expands, emotions intensify, yet everything remains silent. Snow can fall heavily and block roads completely, but we hear nothing. That is the feeling I want to express in my photography.
The women in your photographs — sometimes yourself, sometimes imagined — seem caught between vulnerability and strength, between cultures and states of being. What draws you to that in-between space?
This is where performance enters. I revisit — or inhabit — feelings born from events that consumed me emotionally. The shifting moods in my Weapon of Choice self-portraits mirror trauma’s fractured landscape. Some days trauma is invisible; other days it’s overwhelming. When my emotions intensify, I instinctively reach for the camera. At that moment, the woman in the frame is undeniably me. Over time, however, the photograph releases its grip, and the emotion becomes universal — belonging to someone else, somewhere else.
Looking ahead, what questions or emotions continue to drive you? What do you hope your next work will explore?
I’ve developed a visual idea around the concept of the third culture, which I’ll begin as a side series. I want to work slowly, allowing the emotional connection to develop. My focus remains on issues affecting women in society, and I’m currently drawn to exploring the “father complex.” This feels like a natural continuation of Weapon of Choice. I’m no longer taking new photographs for that series; I’m now editing it into a photobook, which I hope to complete sometime in 2026.
Sometimes someone’s weapon of choice is simply getting up in the morning—a will to live. Making work is how I stand up and continue.
Minami Ivory’s photographs do not ask to be understood quickly. They ask for time, for patience, and for a willingness to remain with what does not resolve. Across her practice, silence is neither absence nor retreat; it is the condition through which experience is held without being reduced to explanation. Images pause, gestures suspend, and surfaces resist completion. Meaning accumulates slowly, through repetition and restraint.
In an image culture shaped by immediacy and exposure, Ivory’s work insists on another register. It proposes that not everything must be shown, that care can take the form of withholding, and that endurance can be a precise, deliberate act. The photograph becomes a surface that can still be argued with—not because it promises revelation, but because it refuses to settle.
What remains is not clarity, but attention. The viewer is asked to stay with uncertainty, to accept silence as a working language, and to recognise restraint not as limitation, but as a way of continuing.
For further information on Minami Ivory’s work and publications, visit minamiivory.com, perimeterbooks.com, and ccp.org.au.
