Felicity Aylieff makes gigantic porcelain pots in her workshop in Jingdezhen, China. She wheel-throws each vessel with a team of four artisans and fires them in a kiln that’s larger than most people’s kitchen. Her biggest vessels exceed four metres in height and weigh upwards of 1,000 kilograms. She uses a forklift to move them, even inside her own studio. “I started off making table-top-size ceramics, but I found I couldn’t say what I wanted with the smaller pieces,” says the U.K. born artist. “I love the scale of large sculpture and the impact it has.” I was awestruck when I first saw Aylieff’s work last week; there are very few ceramic artists who dare to work on such an awesome scale. Plus, her surface decoration –– like monumental paintings –– is something to behold. At the opposite end of the spectrum, I came across some images of Lucie Rie’s ceramics buttons this week and felt immediately moved by the respect and sensitivity Rie brought to the lowly button. Rie is one of the most celebrated studio potters of our time, and while she’s known for her modernist vessels, it was the buttons that established her career when as a young Jewish émigré she fled Nazi-occupied Austria to build a life in London. Aylieff’s vessels evoke an instant sense of awe and wonder. Rie’s buttons evoke a feeling of survival and hope. There’s something in the extremes here that I’m drawn to. Big, bold, daring and dramatic; tiny, tender, detailed and deliberate. Humans are a species of extremes so it makes sense that we’re drawn to art that reflects this reality.

It begins with the tiny lime green leaves of creeping jenny popping up in patches all over the garden. Next come the dark green leaves of the climbing Hydrangea, and the silvery white ones of four siberian bugloss. The hostas pop up next like the fingers of a green witch and a day or two later the grasses turn from straw to green. The geraniums under our budding dogwood are next to emerge followed shortly by the elegant stems of solomon seal. Our four beech trees are slow to revive while the freeman maple shows its first few rust coloured leaves that will soon turn green. The fringe tree and wisteria –– les pièces de résistance –– are the last to awaken, with a spectacle of long white streamers and violet blooms so beautiful that it’s a wonder we’re in Toronto and not Monet’s garden. The only thing now left are the anemones, and they won’t appear until late Summer when the whole garden is so verdant and alive that it’s hard to imagine that all of this beauty was ever underground. I watch it all unfold like a piece of music that gradually thickens and intensifies as instruments enter one by one.