Fifty Formulas: The Artwork Being Built From Your Numbers

Somewhere along the way, street-art glue quietly took over the pocket in my bag where lipstick used to live. That's not a metaphor — it's just what happens when your formula is 5=3 and you've decided to write it on walls in as many places as you can reach.

But my numbers are only one formula among many, and I've become increasingly sure that the project shouldn't stop at mine. In December 2025 I put out an open call: I wanted to start collecting real formulas from real people — X pregnancies equals Y children, written by whoever needed to write it — for a large-scale piece built entirely out of other people's numbers, not just my own.

5 = 3 is my formula. 5 pregnancies = 3 babies. What's your formula? I'm collecting real stories for a large-scale artwork. I need 50 formulas X = Y.

Fifty is a specific, deliberately large number. One plaque is a personal statement. Fifty formulas, collected from fifty different people and brought together into a single piece, becomes something closer to a chorus — proof, in a very literal, countable way, that this isn't one woman's unusual story, but something that happens to enough people that fifty of them could be found without much difficulty at all.

Fifty formulas is really just the latest shape this instinct has taken. A street poster built out of pregnancy tests and a sheet of free stickers anyone can print at home came from the same place — wanting the project to exist in forms that don't depend on me personally gluing something to a wall in a city I happened to visit. Fifty different formulas, collected and combined, might end up being the clearest version of that yet: proof, all in one piece, that this number belongs to far more people than just me.

You can share your formula through the website, or send it to me directly. Nothing gets used without permission, and no name goes anywhere near it unless you want it to. I'm still collecting — if your X and Y aren't the same number, I'd like to know what they are.