[4] A year later, the artist relocated to Germany, moving to Munich in 1984 and then Cologne in 1986, where she developed an interest in sculpture and began experimenting with mediums such as bronze and ceramic.

While the use of these mediums overlap throughout the course of her career, her oeuvre can also be loosely divided into epochs that place focus on central themes, subjects, and materials.

[11] Ikemura herself has expressed a particular emotional affinity with the medium of drawing, describing it a "immediate and honest," with this honesty being a crucial tenet to her work and lifestyle.

Seeking to gain some space to regroup and start afresh, she went on a retreat to the Swiss Alps, where she began to do some work with landscape painting.

[13] Starting in the 1990s, she began to experiment with both small paintings, to focus more closely on specific subject matter, as well as larger-scale triptychs.

Art critics and historians have surmised that her choice of the triptych is in part an act of cultural translation, another subtle incorporation of transnational religious/spiritual elements that imbues the work with the sense of abstraction and multiplicitous interpretative potential that Ikemura's artistic universe is so known for.

"[15] Feeling herself that she was taught to grow up and leave childhood behind quickly due to this societal model of girl/womanhood, Ikemura seeks to push back against stereotypical depictions of girls in popular culture (in both Japan and beyond) as meek, helpless, decorative, and sexualized.

Such subversions of these models can be seen across her work, including her terracotta "Cabbage Heads" from 2015 onward, her oil paintings of a subject called "Miko" in the 90s, and her recent tempera portraits.

Adding to this ontological complexity, it has also appeared as a symbol of fertility in folklore around the world and is a major figure in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, a book featuring a similar kind of abstract, dreamlike universe to that created by Ikemura's works.

[18] Ikemura was deeply affected by the aftermath of the March 2011 Tohoku Earthquake, and in response created the first largescale Usagi Kannon.