Back in mid-’90s suburban Westchester, New York, there were not so many ways for an essentially well-behaved, academically minded, socially timid twelve-year-old to be subversive. Cigarettes were gross; my parents had no problem with dyed hair, which kind of sapped it of its transgressive fun; and other, more dramatic signs of rebellion might elicit attention I was ill-equipped to process, let alone enjoy. But within the contents of my three-ring-binder CD case, I ranged far and wide. And there was no one who took me further than that punkish pixie of Icelandic cool, Björk. I took one look at the white dots dripping from her lower lids on the album cover for Debut, and hightailed it for the FACE Stockholm store on Prince Street to procure something that might, in my bolder moments, let me emulate her look. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking for, but I was fairly sure I was more likely to find it downtown than at the mall.

When Post came out, the friend who had introduced me to Björk’s music in the first place (she had an older brother, of course), and I huddled round the speakers, entranced by the electronic hymns, punctured by the unlikely anthem “It’s Oh So Quiet.” We had little knowledge of the song’s layered origins—a cover of Betty Hutton’s 1951 ballad, the Spike Jonze–directed video inspired by The Umbrellas of Cherbourg—we just knew that it had verve and pizzazz, yet none of the musical-theater-y tackiness that those descriptors implied. Over the years that followed, I watched as Björk morphed into an even more adventurous boundary-breaking artist, not just in her actual work, but in her self-presentation, which was, before it was for so many people, really part of her work as well: the crystal face mask (which she memorably wore to meet Prince Charles), the fluorescent-colored pom-pom headpiece, the swan dress—perhaps the campiest of them all. Her outfits were “internet memes before such things existed” as Hua Hsu memorably described them in The New Yorker.

So when it was announced that Björk would be taking up a kind of sporadic residency in New York at The Shed, performing a show titled Cornucopia seven times between May 9 and June 1, I was, ahem, eager to see it, and to learn everything I could about what was advertised as her most theatrical project yet. The show is directed by Argentine film director Lucrecia Martel, with Olivier Rousteing and Iris van Herpen making the costumes; the show will also include a harpist, a flute septet, and a person responsible for lasers. Undergirding it all is the work of set designer Chiara Stephenson, whose past work has included design for The xx’s 2018 festival show, televised performances by Lorde, and a Miley Cyrus–and–Madonna collaboration. But what does it mean to literally build the ground upon which a ground-breaking artist will stand? I spoke with Stephenson to try to understand a bit of the inspiration and process behind this unprecedented show.

I think a lot of people don’t understand what a set designer does. How do you explain it?