The idea behind creating a website for this project was to find a way of sharing the process of discovery experienced during the residency. By doing this I was not only revealing the way that I worked but also on a personal and creative level, I was trying to assess each experience to articulate how I felt about what was happening. Whilst some things posted were directly linked to the project others were more random, haphazard and spontaneous. The major point I was trying to make in doing this was that as artists we don't make work in isolation from everything else we do (well I don't anyway). My work in particular often doesn't start with a clear product but only a number of parameters and the whole process of making work and all the experiences that surround that process become just as important as the work itself. As a consequence Idid not create one major work but created small responses to the everyday-ness of being in Dawson, the website being the best place for these different things to be placed.

Whilst there was an intellectual reason for producing the site there was also a creative impetus. I really enjoyed putting stuff up there that was quick, random, unarticulated, spontaneous and not always clear. Despite the fact that there was obviously some editing (I didn't want to disappear up my own jacksy and waffle on for eight millenia) I tried where possible to be as honest as I could without causing offence.

A lot of people thought that I spent the whole time in Dawson drunk - I would agree that this is probably a fair summary. Drinking was just as much a response to the place as the work therefore a part of the process. I can hear you all scoffing at what might sound llike me trying to defend my drunken behaviour but Dawson is a place of extremes and therefore of alcohol. It would have been rude to beT total (pray my Primitive Methodist dead great Aunt will be turning in her grave) because drinking and socialising is a large part of the culture as much as caribou hunting, skiing, skidooing and gold.ld.

It is uncanny as a British person going to Canada. Everything feels the same but different in some way. In Freud's uncanny or 'unheimlich' which directly translates as unhomely he claims that it is the familiar that is somehow different or strange, something comfortable that is not quite right that creates a sense of the uncanny. This is precisely how I felt. The money, the buildings, street names, the language, but it is far more than just a result of globalisation. This uncanniness I am sure comes from once being a British Colony. From the Queen's head on all the coins to the alliance (until the Iraq war) with British poltics and an appreciation of British comedy and their own sense of wit, irony and stupidity. Yep being in Canada was like being at home - only different.

I think difference between Canada and the U.K. is artiuclated through landscape. I say this because I believe it is the landscape that then defines the other attributes of difference.

I thought there was a particular earthiness about Canadians which makes them relaxed and easy to get on with. I think this comes from living in a landscape that you have to live 'in' rather than 'on'. The landscape no matter how you look at it is MASSIVE, diverse and humbling to stand amongst.

The vast landscape in Canada gives a greater sense of space, even in the busy metropolis of Toronto. It didn't feel as intense as when I arrived in Heathrow and checked on to my last flight to Manchester - it was hell. The lack of space in Britain is both a bad thing and a good thing. Firstly I think being grosely over populated everybody feels hassled and harrassed to find comfortable personal space. This prompts rudeness, arrogance, selfishness and often irrational bad tempered behaviour which we have all been on the receiving end. Because there are so many people everything you do on a daily basis demands waiting in a queue whether that be a telephone queue, a checkout queue, a toilet queue, a dinner queue, a queue to pay, a queue to get a drink, a queue to get some money, a queue to have a good time. The need to alleviate getting in a queue propels the need to do things faster, if I get there quick I will be at the front of the queue and won't have to waste as much time and therefore can get on with something else. The queue therefore perpetuates competitiveness encouraging aggression and unreasonable uncurtish behaviour. I can at this point imagine the Canadians thinking what can possibly be good about any of that - it sounds terrible. The flip side of this is it does create a creative competitive economy because people are striving to be individual in any way they can which sometimes requires them to be creative in their approaches to seeking their own personal space whether that be a physical space or a head space where your individual identity can shine through. The fact that Britain is so busy with so many different ethnic cultures and races also fosters creativity in having a vast range of influences to draw from.

Canada's landscape is resource rich. The economy is largely driven by resource extraction and exports. Employment in these industries is still high. Britain's resource days are over. Farming and forestry are still industries that are being squeezed, the former of which is struggling to be a viable industry in the European market and there aren't that many trees to draw from anymore for forestry to be a strong industry. The small oil industry out in the north sea apparently has enough to keep us going for another 40 years but that is alongside imports from Saudi. Everything else we need to survive is imported. It pays for Britain to stay friends with lots of resource rich countries and keep them onside. We are screwed without them.

In light of this when I first arrived in Canada I was well impressed with the environmental concern and strategies that seemed to be in place to support bio-diversity. In the UK industry and wildlife fight for the same space and so seeing the gold industry the way it churns up the land you automatically assume it has to be bad environmentally. Wrong - it seems that gold mining in Dawson unlocked a lot of nutrient rich soils that were frozen in permafrost and encouraged more wildlife to inhabit the creeks. It made me sad to think that in the UK rural industry, mining, quarrying, farming has slowly disappeared or is disappearing from the land and what we will soon be looking at is an empty but beautiful picture postcard landscape with tourists and nothing else. Everybody else would have disappeared because there is no work. I understand that there has to be an ability to work with the wildlife and the landscape but I am not hopeful for the British Countryside and how it will produce

The diversity of landscape supports a wide range of wildlife. You get the sense this diversity is important to the 'image' of Canada just by looking at the money, the maple leaf, beaver, elk, polar bear that sit in the other side of the Queen. Canada uses the image of its wildlife as part of its cultural economy. In comparison the symbols on the back of British coins, abstract constructs of power, gates and chains, feathers and crown, thistle and crown, lion and crown, rose and crown, Britannia, (strangely enough a lot of these are names of pubs aswell) whilst most of them contain some natural symbol they have been abstracted to create different images with the same meaning, the subservience of all nature to succumb to the power of the throne. Canada and U.K trade off these images to their advantage, the former the natural wild haven, the latter the historical monarch sustaining tradition, power and rule.

The footage, the web material and all the writing I did whilst in Dawson, I am sifting through in order to try and make sense of how I can use it. I want to tell the story of John Wilkinson, the man who I loosely followed whilst I was in Dawson but not just as some story that tells it like it was. One that looks at the implications of trying to look at the past in a contemporary world. We do so with a different perspective, different ideals, different expectations and so I have to incorporate my journey to the Yukon as a way of navigating the audience through the wierdness that was the gold rush and how it appears today how it is documented and what we can ascertain from what is left.

I have since visited John's grave. It is an ordinary grave right on the pathway of the church yard. It kind of sticks out as if it wants to be noticed. Nick bumped into it as we went past it which made me look. It was one of the first graves I looked at. "This can't be it. It can't be that easy to find something like this." I tromped off to try and see if there were any other John Wilkinson's and there was, a younger one so I didn't know which it might be. I checked the census records for St John's Chapel. There was a John aged 26 and his family Sarah, his wife and two children John and Edith that lived in the dale in 1881, by 1891 they were no longer in the records. He would have been 42 by the time he went to the Yukon. "That can't be him, what about his family." There was no mention of families in the information from Dawson and he seemed too old to be lugging stuff about and going on great jaunts.

I know 42 is not old but in miners terms he should have been dead. Most miners by the age of 42 had terminal lung diseases or were dead as I found out. So that can't be him.

But then I received an email from a relative of William Scouse who had gone out with Wilkinson and made a fortune only to drown on one of the steam ships.

From the census records in Nanaimo, there was a John Wilkinson and wife Sarah, children John and Edith there in 1891. So it was him. He had gone to Nanaimo with his family to work in coal where he had met up with the others where they hatched the plan and there is a wealth of information about their return.