I’m familiar with almost every memorial tree, bench and park in the Annex, and a fair few beyond our borders. Anyone who walks with me regularly knows that reading the commemorative plaques is a bit of an obsession. How do you distill a person into a sentence or two, capture their spirit in a stanza, their life’s legacy in a rhyming couplet? “Jay Macpherson enriched our world,” says a commemorative plaque for the poet in a parkette at the corner of Dupont and Avenue Road. “And mountains for David were made to see over,” are the words written on David William Priddle’s commemorative bench on Willcocks Street. “In loving memory of Barbara Ann Ward, from her devoted husband of 57 years.” “Michael J. Walker read here.” Some of my favourites are in the Philosopher’s Walk. Gordon Bruce Cummings “walked this path in happiness.” Pablo Neruda’s Soneto de la Noche appears with a dedication from his family. Leo Zakuta, “much loved professor and tennis player. Iconoclast. Gentleman.” I think it’s a beautiful tradition, and a lovely way for a person to live on. These people are on my daily walks, and I feel I know them. “You were the sunshine of our lives, and always will be,” reads Samya Maiko Al-Kholani’s bench beside Robarts Library. Very often, it’s the simplest ones that move me the most. “Daddy.”

There is a beautiful simplicity to Renee Gouin‘s work. “I’m inspired by the process of reduction, paring down objects to the essential form,” says the artist of her printmaking process. In stories, I find myself as drawn to what isn’t in the image as to what is; our imagination fills in the negative space. The channels series is tender and playful, and I love all the details in women in clothes 3. The print below is a favourite; who doesn’t need red shoes?

Bari Ziperstein‘s is an artist who is constantly stretching the possibilities of her material. Clay is versatile to begin with, and Ziperstein embraces that. “The transformation of clay and testing its technical limits informs so much of my practice,” says Ziperstein, whose large scale, colour rich vessels stand out in any room. Just look at this acid yellow cubist planter and this giant Yves Klein vase. And what of all the whimsical, wacky vessels below? Her work is bold, irreverent and highly original. “… it’s about creating a new ceramic silhouette with unexpected processes that excites me.”

On Saturday, we sat outside in the sunshine and marvelled at the majesty of Spring. It’s neither beautiful nor bountiful out there, but with every snowdrop, every crocus, every chirp of a bird, comes a tiny sense of triumph. We survived another Winter. And beneath the leaves and dirt and debris, lies the promise of perennials. Of bare feet. Of drinks at dusk. Of bicycle bells. Of possibility. This winter has flown by. Was it the mild January? Or was it that we sledded through February? We did so little, and yet the days trotted on. And maybe that’s just it. Keep it simple. Relish in the small stuff. A beautiful Winter sky. A fresh fall of snow. And Winter finds a way of turning into Spring.