Park Factors investigates the fine line between being in and out of control in the face of illness and death by retelling a moment after my mom’s death from lung cancer through a strangely relational statistic, the park factor, which measures the relative likelihood that a specific kind of hit will happen more or less in a particular ballpark as compared to all others in the league. The inability of this statistic to stand on its own – the way in which it can only be made sense of through an understanding of the same kind of action taking place elsewhere – becomes a metaphor for the effect of loss on spaces once occupied and overseen by loved ones now missing. Park Factors uses baseball, a game she loved, itself celebrated for being simultaneously perfectly routine and totally unpredictable, to create a context for the unknowable.

Images and text in Park Factors were printed on a Vandercook Proof Press. The images are pressure prints. The text is letterpress printed from hand-set type. The binding is an accordion with image / image and text on both sides of the book. The spine can be removed and placed on either side of the book, effectively producing two reading / viewing possibilities.

In my artist’s books and prints, I investigate relationships of history, desire, and power and the shapes they take in everyday living. Combining writing, images, and book forms, I create works that weave together personal stories and narratives derived from archival research and interviews with practitioners in fields from medicine to baseball. My books and prints draw out unlikely metaphors and the questions that emerge from them to imagine means for making provisional, partial sense of regular but confounding experiences – desire, love, grief, nostalgia, violence – by envisioning a multitude of relations to them.