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.

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.

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.

I think being an artist and taking on those challenges is just how it is for me. Because I was always a foreigner, I was always the outsider.

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.

I think if art has one underlying value, it's that.

I think it's every artist's nature to want to escape. It's also human nature in a way, depending on your personality, to want to get away from it all.