Two Letters From Heide

For Yours Truly, Melanie Katsalidis asked fourteen of our artists to begin with a letter and answer it with a ring. When it came to her own, she passed over the great romantic correspondences and found what she was looking for across the city, at Heide Museum of Modern Art.

Heide was the home of John and Sunday Reed, the patrons who gathered around them the artists who remade Australian painting: Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, Joy Hester, John Perceval. It was an unconventional household, and it ran on letters. Melanie has taken two of them, and Sunday is at the centre of both: once writing, once written to.

The first is Sunday’s, written to John early in their marriage, before they had moved to Heide.

"I often wonder if we realise as much as we should how lucky we are to be together—it’s the happiest thing that will ever happen to me I know, I suppose if I feel lucky you must feel lucky too—darling—or doesn’t that follow—it just seems as if my whole spirit flew naturally to you & with you … All the outside things that we love & want are made rich & deep for me because I share them with you".

It is a letter about luck, written by someone who has just noticed hers. The line Melanie focused on is the one in the middle, where the luck turns into something closer to physics: "my whole spirit flew naturally to you & with you".

The second letter was written to Sunday. Sidney Nolan had lived and painted at Heide, and his relationship with Sunday was at the heart of the household. In 1942 he was called up and posted to the Wimmera, and from Horsham he wrote:

"Darling my heart goes with you … No we won’t fail darling, we have never done so & more than ever now when so much is asked of your life & mine with it, it seems from a happiness that has proved and proved itself we can lead a way that can express itself in some permanence … I do tremble for you sometimes girl you are not aware of how much you have given me."

A letter that asks how a love might express itself in some permanence is a reasonable brief for a jeweller.

Melanie’s answer is a pair of rings in 18ct yellow gold, each built around a rose cut diamond from her own collection. In the jewellery trade, the rose cut was developed before the brilliant: flat underneath, domed and faceted above, made to glow by candlelight rather than flash. It is not a cut Melanie usually works with, however, she chose these because they feel more romantic, and of an earlier time.

The Whole Spirit ring answers Sunday’s letter: a round rose cut diamond, a whole stone for a whole spirit, flanked by two freeform rose cuts. The Darling Heart ring answers Nolan’s: a pale champagne pear diamond, warm in colour and shaped like a drop, clustered with two freeform rose cut diamonds, for a letter sent from the dry wheat country of the Wimmera by a man who admits that he trembles for her.

The two were made to sit together, and they are sold separately, which is its own comment on the household that inspired them.

Yours Truly is a group exhibition of rings by fourteen of our artists, each one made in response to a letter. 12 to 28 November 2026, at 28 Russell Place, Melbourne.