My mother’s battle with cancer financially devastated my parents. When she died, my father fixated on winning the lottery as a solution to the crisis. He believed that there are patterns in the universe, and that by studying nature they can be discerned. Things we believe to be random can be predicted, if the variables are understood. He spent the next several years working on discovering the pattern. Every day he took thousands of random samples of numbers and placed them into color-coded grids that only made sense to him.

I did not get along with my father. He was a difficult man to love. But when he died, and I sat with the boxes of pages of gridded numbers, I recognized much of myself in the pages...the study of nature in search of something deeper, the same desire for meaning and order, the same tendency to obsess. Although I would deny it, I am my father’s daughter.

In these photographs, I study nature, beauty, and the minutia of my own life in the context of my father’s data, with all the emotion and ambiguous connections that such a study implies. The images, captured on black and white film with a lensless pinhole camera and often layered with photographs of my father’s numbers, are hand colored and printed in the layered, historical process of gum bichromate. This highly involved process yields images that are softly focused and reminiscent of a constructed memory.