Belonging to More Than One Place

Not every artist in Yours Truly chose a letter in the strict sense. Some went to the verses people carry with them instead, recite at the end of a year, or reach for when they are describing a country they have left. Shimara Carlow has made three rings from three poems, one each from Australia, Scotland and Ireland.

The Beauty Ring comes from Dorothea Mackellar’s My Country: "I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains, of ragged mountain ranges, of droughts and flooding rains. I love her far horizons, I love her jewel-sea, her beauty and her terror, the wide brown land for me."

The Cup of Kindness Ring comes from Auld Lang Syne: "And surely you’ll buy your pint cup, and surely I’ll buy mine. And we’ll take a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne."

The Midnight Glimmer Ring comes from Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree: "And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings. There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, and evening full of the linnet’s wings."

Read together they are a letter about belonging to more than one place. Mackellar wrote My Country while homesick in England. Yeats wrote Innisfree on a London pavement, after hearing water in a shop window. Auld Lang Syne is sung by people about to part. All three are written from somewhere else, about somewhere loved, which is the oldest reason anyone has had to write anything down.

Shimara has made the three into objects small enough to keep on a hand.

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.