Sometimes I'm inspired by the material and sometimes there's an idea that speaks to a material.
Poetry makes sense of the parts of human experience that are confusing and not decodable in any other way. It makes accessible the inaccessible.
There's always a moment that tilts the scales of the project, and it's always different in every project.
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.
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 there's an interesting line drawn towards extreme environments, and the way I define extreme is through a sense of otherness. Or foreignness.
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.
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.
The way that I Am is designed, it becomes a kind of archipelago, which the Bahamas are.
I think when you're younger and making things, it's something that you have to fight through, to finish things. I feel like I'm past that stage, and I get the appreciation for being in that moment, and soaking it in.
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.
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 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.
The idea of being in the desert is fundamental, but it's totally relative, and it's about that membrane: the way that one defines self versus the environment.
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 if art has one underlying value, it's that.
