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The birch-bark canoe of the savage seems to me one of the most beautiful and perfect things of the kind constructed by human art.

I've always wanted to sail around the world in a handmade boat, and I built a boat.

Boats are something I am very, very passionate about; cars are something I grew up with... I used to race cars since I was a child.

I am not a yachting person, by nature, but I have just enough experience on the sea under sail to feel a certain nostalgia for it when I see a big white racing yacht heeled over at cruising speed on the ocean, and I can still tie a mean bowline knot on just about anything in less than 10 seconds.

My recollection of a hundred lovely lakes has given me blessed release from care and worry and the troubled thinking of our modern day. It has been a return to the primitive and the peaceful.

When I was on that boat, I realized the only way I would feel creatively challenged was if I totally changed everything about my environment and put myself in a storm, in a sense.

I've worked in the Inuit hamlets of the west coast of Hudson Bay since 1994. Over that time I've been very moved by both the pace of social change there - the loss of traditional ways of seeing the world, the affinity for and comfort with the land - and by the social disarray that change of this pace produces.

Americans generally associate boats with leisure. Vastly less prosperous, Egyptians associate them with nothing but labour. Rowing a boat is something a fisherman is forced to do to make a living; how could such an activity bring me - a woman no less - pleasure?

I love boats. Anything that runs, anything mechanical. It's my God-given passion in life.

Since the summer days of my Canadian childhood, I have loved to canoe across the dark mirror of northern lakes, paddling with an inside flick of the blade, leaving a trail of twisting whirlpools in my wake.