A Love Letter the Forest Cannot Answer

Nearly every letter in Yours Truly was written by one person to another. One was not.
Lisa Roet’s was written by a crowd, to a place.

In 2025, Roet staged a performance at RMIT University called A Letter to Love and Territory, in which the audience was invited to contribute to a love letter written to territory itself. Their responses were projected back into the live performance as the letter grew.

The gibbon is one of the world’s rarest apes and is critically endangered. Gibbons are the only primate other than ourselves with soprano ability, and the performance set an opera singer against a recording of the love call of a white handed male Borneo gibbon. The soprano sang 'Il Dolce Suono', the mad scene from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, while images from Lisa’s research were projected onto her and onto the architecture around her.

The line Lisa has chosen is the one that inspires this ring:

"Golden love and darken earth are reconciled within the containers of the chambers of the heart."

The ring takes that line at its word. A heart shaped rainbow obsidian sits in a gold plated cocktail setting: the gold for golden love, the dark volcanic glass for the earth, and the heart for the chambers that hold them both. Rainbow obsidian reads almost black until the light finds it, and then bands of colour move through the stone. The pairing carries an echo of the gibbons themselves, whose females are golden and whose males are black.

It is a difficult object, and it is meant to be. A love letter to a place is also a record of what is being lost there, and Lisa Roet has spent her career refusing to let the two be separated. Her ring is addressed from many people to a forest, and the forest cannot write back.

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.