You Are My Life, My Very Life

The Yours Truly exhibition takes its name from the way a letter ends. Ever thine, yours always, yours truly. Words written so often that they stopped being read, and a promise all the same. Tessa Blazey’s letter ends differently, and more extravagantly, with a man signing himself, "your boy".

Tessa created a ring for Yours Truly inspired by a letter Orson Welles wrote to Rita Hayworth. He directed and starred alongside her in the strange and spectacular early noir film The Lady from Shanghai (1947). They were married at the time, and both the letter and the film influence the piece.

"Dearest Angel Girl:

... I suppose most of us are lonely in this big world, but we must fall tremendously in love to find it out. The cure is the discovery of our need for company — I mean company in the very special sense we’ve come to understand since we happened to each other — you and I. The pleasures of human experience are emptied away without that companionship — now that I’ve known it; without it joy is just as unendurable as sorrow. You are my life — my very life. Never imagine your hope approximates what you are to me. Beautiful, precious little baby — hurry up the sun! — make the days shorter till we meet. I love you, that’s all there is to it.
Your boy,
Orson"

In Tessa’s own words:

"“You are my life, my very life,” Welles wrote, and the ring holds both sides of that pairing in a single piece of 18ct yellow gold. A black rose cut diamond of 1.7 carats stands for Orson’s mystery, power and dynamism. Beside it, a long hex cut Montana sapphire of 0.67ct, held in six claws, stands for Rita, the brightest star in Hollywood at the time. Its grey-blue facets also recall the film’s disorienting Mirror Maze shootout. The grey and black palette echoes the film’s own."

The form is a toi et moi, the oldest love letter in jewellery: two stones, side by side - you and me. Here it is doing something more complicated. The two stones are not matched and were never going to be. One absorbs light, one throws it back. They are held in the same band and they do not resolve, which is a fair description of the film, and of the marriage that made it.

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.