In making this sculpture, Orli began to draw connections between seemingly disparate things they were thinking about, observing, and experiencing. The shape of New York City’s circular bike racks, which punctuate sidewalks throughout the city, served as an initial anchor, allowing the artist to respond to the eventual exhibition site through a familiar urban form. From there, she drew inspiration from a drone video documenting a humpback whale giving birth; the Global Conveyor Belt, a system of ocean currents driven by differences in temperature; the ballet Serenade; the forest spirit in Princess Mononoke; and Red-spotted Purple butterflies engaging in mud puddling, a behavior in which butterflies gather nutrients from damp soil.

Through a process of associative thinking and material experimentation, these seemingly unrelated references began to converge, bringing together ideas of birth, circulation, transformation, collective movement, and the interconnectedness of living systems. Rather than illustrating any single source, the artist allowed their formal and conceptual qualities to accumulate through the process of working with paper pulp, resulting in a sculpture that explores the entanglement of the urban and ecological, the organic and constructed, and the individual and planetary.