I was born in a small clapboard house on an island, but I also have certain privileges that I didn't have when I was on the island. So that dichotomy again is actually really crucial.

The way that I Am is designed, it becomes a kind of archipelago, which the Bahamas are.

If you take a flower to Mars, for example, the hostility of Mars probably won't allow the flower to live without oxygen. The process of being an artist, for someone who wasn't born in an arts-centric environment - I came from the Bahamas, where there's not a historic tradition of art-making, at least from the Western prospective - in a way is kind of an alien concept.

There are certain conceptual powers in this project, like the relationship of glass to sand, and the idea of putting glass back into the earth, which is where it comes from, which are related to the whole concept of I Am. So there's that one below-surface idea, and then there's these other practical and more pragmatic ideas about how the light functions and the geometry and mathematics behind the reverberation of light from the surface outward.

When you're in [ Bahamas], it feels like a bunch of islands, with keys and things like that. It's an existential archipelago. It's funny, you try to escape who you are and where you're from, but it's always part of your social DNA.

I was approached by Neville Wakefield. I've known Neville for almost a decade, but we had never really worked together. We sort of threatened to work together on a number of other projects but never really did.

There's always a moment that tilts the scales of the project, and it's always different in every project.