Hello and welcome to the exciting final post of this school year. This post will be about our humanities project that was showcased at the PLP spring exhibition, titled “Cray Cray Yay Yay”.

This project had us find someone we were interested in on the north shore from the past or present time that has had or will have an impact on North Vancouver. My choice of person was Alfred Wallace, who was an important figure in the development of North Vancouver.

Here you can see my short write up that was on my table at the exhibition.

The goal of this project was to research and share your impact maker’s importance at the spring exhibition where we invited parents as well as the impact maker themselves, or if they were no longer alive we invited someone close to our impact maker. If you took the time to read my brief explanation of my impact maker above, you would know that Alfred Wallace was the founder of Burrard Dry Dock, which was a massive dry dock in Burrard Inlet. The person that I invited to the exhibition was Paul Hebson, who is the VP and GM of the Vancouver Drydock Co. which is owned by Seaspan and is located partially on the land that Wallace’s drydock was located, where the original drydock was several times larger than the current drydock. This is not just because the land in North Vancouver, especially on the waterfront. The other reason for the drydock being so much smaller nowadays is because of the use case for the drydock. Back when the Wallace family owned the drydock, mostly in the war times like WWI and II, the docks were used to construct navy ships very quickly, and navy boats being as big as they are, they needed a lot of space to be worked on. But that’s not it, because of the efficiency of the drydock, they were able to construct multiple ships at the same time.

Here you can see my portrait, which depicts Alfred Wallace. You can probably spot some of the important decisions I had to make while creating this portrait. The first and most obvious one, the face, or lack thereof. This decision was the start of my thought process for the portrait because as hard as I searched, there are no recorded photos of Wallace (probably due to the lack of cameras during his lifetime). This decision was also reinforced by the fact that Wallace is mostly known for the boats that were produced at his drydock rather than his person. That is the next important part of this drawing. The silhouette is made up of boats because of hit boat building reputation, and each boat was chosen because they were very similar to or the same model as the ships that were built on Wallace’s drydock (the Queen of Tsawwassen was one of them). The last important choice that you might notice in this video is that the water is a somewhat odd colour. This was done to make the scene look like a storm, indicating the hard times that Wallace went through throughout his life, especially WWI.

Presenting this at the exhibition was a lot of fun because I got to tell everyone about the cool things that I learned not just about Alfred Wallace, but also about the development of the North Shore as well as how drydocks work thanks to my tour of the drydocks.

Thanks for reading this far!

Later!