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 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.

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

I don't really feel pressure. I'm so distracted by what we're doing; I'm doing this four-acre project, it's just absorbing all my attention. Before you know it we're onto the next project, and so on and so forth.

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