 My name is Caledonia Curry and we're sitting in front of my piece, Submerged Motherlands and the Cantor Rotunda on the fifth floor of the Brooklyn Museum. This is kind of such a unique space in the building that I wanted to make something that really fit into the space and rose up into the space and kind of addressed the whole space. So first what you'll see is we built a 60 foot tree and it's sort of intended to kind of be the sort of nesting docking spot for these sculptural rafts, which traveled down the Hudson River and also on the Adriatic Sea to Venice. Every element of the rafts is homemade from the flotation to the sculptural elements. About 30 people at a time lived aboard them and traveled for a few months each summer in 2008 and 2009. Also included is a structure that's kind of like a gazebo, kind of like a small temple. It's made up of portraits. There's a portrait of a friend of mine with her new baby and there are portraits of my own mother in her life cycle. And on the inside there are honeycombs and wasps nests and various decorative elements that you can pass through and hang out in. Well the very first thing that I had to do was get in touch with an engineer and show him my design and be like, is this insane? Is this dangerous? Should I not do this? We had to construct a lift point that the building didn't already have and so it's been pretty interesting working within the structure and sort of figuring out sort of what's already here and sort of trying to understand the architecture and how we can work with it. And then we just spent weeks like tearing and shredding and dyeing fabric with like instant coffee, with paint, with fabric dye. We just kind of like experimented with everything. Cutting out paper leaves and building up these kind of roots and paper machaying them and putting the dyed fabric onto them. There's also a lot of washes of fire extinguisher paint around the outside which was, it's kind of the best tool ever that was really fun. What took about two days and probably like 70 to 80 gallons of liquid just loaded into pressurized tanks and sprayed just over and over again for over the period of couple days and let it dry and continue spraying and that was really fun. Originally I had been thinking a lot about climate change. The rafts when I first started to create them I was thinking a lot about climate change and rising seas and kind of dislocation of communities and then Sandy hit and so it seemed like a really kind of an important time to continue that kind of thinking just as a way to sort of like meditate on all of our anxieties about this situation bringing this thinking kind of to the forefront and trying to tangibly like get our sort of hearts and minds around it. That's always what I'm doing as I'm thinking about sort of environmental issues.