Q: How did you think of the title for this project?
A: Actually, the project has three titles. The whole project is called Episodes. Then there's Bus Park, which is the bus outside, and Forevermore in the gallery inside. When I go around looking for things on the street to use in my artwork, I always look for the stories behind them. So for me Episodes is really multiple stories. Bus Park is a play on words in that it's both parked-like a car would be parked-and a park, meaning a natural, controlled place where people can sit. Which describes this particular bus-it's a place for people to sit and for things that grow. Then in the gallery inside, several pieces make up Forevermore. It's about the passage of time and the sysiphean task of museum conservators who try to control the inevitable changes in materials that come with the passing of time.

Q: How do you come up with your ideas? Are they spontaneous?
A: Some of them are. I think one of the great things about working at a new site is that you don't fall into the same old habits that you might in your studio where you have your bag of tricks. For me it's always necessary to react to things that are in the immediate environment and to find a way to use what I see in those spaces. A lot of times I look for things in the spaces that people take for granted and try to give those things new meaning.

Q: What made you decide to use a school bus and all the other materials?
A: I was thinking about three parts of the museum that are really vibrant in terms of how they interact with the public or vice versa: the Education Department, the Conservation Department, and the interior courtyard space. And I was thinking about the parts of the Museum where you get the sense that Mrs. Gardner created an entire installation. I feel she's an artist and that the museum staff are the caretakers of the installation. So I really wanted to work with the idea of installation and the passage of time and at the same time I wanted to think about the museum in terms of education. So I came up with the idea of the school bus as a space that I can control. It was really a way of carving out my own niche, so to speak, within Isabella Stewart Gardner's very strong vision.

The pencils, of course, went along with the idea of education. Right outside the courtyard area they have greenhouses where they grow the plants. As I passed by the greenhouses going in and out of the museum I saw these pots, bringing to mind the idea of growth and development and nurturing. And then it was a matter of seeing what would grow in these flowerpots which led me to think of pencils, which again made sense in terms of the school bus. Pencils are what you use to communicate thoughts and to make your mark, you write it down so that you can communicate. The very rich dialogue of how these different elements interconnect made sense.

Q: How do you want people to experience your artwork?
A: I hope that people will come to it with very few preconceptions. A lot of what I do is really about breaking down people's expectations. At first when they come in they might be perplexed or a little confused but in the end they get visually engaged. I use unexpected visual elements as a kind of lure to "trap" people into a dialogue with the work-it forces them to deal with the work in ways they wouldn't normally in any other kind of situation.

In creating my work I think about how to layer stories and what kind of questions to ask. Then I start thinking about the materials that I want to use, and then about how I want people to react to the whole environment or the individual, transformed object.

Q: Were you an artist first or a discarded materials person?
A: I grew up in a family where artists were really the guys who were crazy and went around cutting their ears off and doing other stuff you didn't want to get involved in. But I had some drawing skills and I had gotten the reputation in school as the class artist, so I gravitated towards art. But then the question was how to make a living at it. I met a really important teacher, Emily Mason, and she got me to go to an art camp. And it was a fantastic experience because I got a chance to be around real artists who weren't cutting their ears off or doing crazy things (laughing)-they were actually making a living! And so I realized that I could do that. In the course of all that I moved to Harlem-this was before Harlem became the boomtown that is now. Back then people were using all the empty lots as dumpsites, and I started seeing things that had been thrown out, and some things really spoke to me. I started using them in my work, trying to echo the stories behind those discarded objects.