Possible Worlds 5

Two little girls, my sister and I, proudly holding the key to Bolsover Castle in 1969. We hover in front of a striking building in Iqaluit as ravens fly above.

I moved to Canada with my parents at the age of 16. We lived in Toronto and it seemed a far away and alien place from Southampton, where I spent my childhood. Things were almost the same, but not quite. Assumptions could not be made. Canada was a vast land of extremes and seemed inhospitable. After a decade in Ontario, I moved to the more familiar climate of the west coast of British Columbia. My sister moved to Ontario a few years after me.

In 2000 I was fortunate enough to spend 2 weeks in Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut. It was a thrilling and humbling experience. It took 5 hours to fly from Vancouver to Ottawa and 5 hours to fly north from Ottawa to Iqaluit. I had never been able to grasp the idea of "North" before this trip. The arctic is a long way away and is like nowhere else on earth.

In the Possible Worlds series I have chosen to combine images from my childhood in England with images I took in Iqaluit and Pangnirtung in 2000 to illustrate how strange the idea and reality of Canada appeared to me for the first few years following our move.