The Garden Between Two Houses

For Yours Truly, gallery director Melanie Katsalidis asked fourteen of our artists to begin with a letter and answer it with a ring. The letter could come from anywhere: history, a poem, a family drawer. The ring had to be the reply.

Kim Victoria went to Emily Dickinson, writing to Susan Gilbert in 1855.

"I will raise the lid to my box of Phantoms, and lay one more love in."

Susan went on to marry Dickinson’s brother and to live next door for the rest of Emily’s life. The letters kept crossing the garden for nearly four decades. Kim reads them as love letters, because she does not think they can be read any other way.

Her response is three rings, each taking its name from the Latin.

Amarca, from amor and arca, is a box. Its lid is set with an opal, and beneath the lid sits the shell of a snail, one of the small things Dickinson gathered and sent to Sue. The box itself is hollow. Daisies and a rose hide in the texture of the exterior, abstracted from specimens in Dickinson’s own herbarium.

Vitta takes the summer grass that tied those small things together, and the ribbon threaded through another of the letters. A ribbon circles the ring, binding an Australian sapphire the colour of honey and pressed flowers to the gold.

Clausa is named for a late note sent across the garden: "Take the Key to the Lily, now, and I will lock the Rose." A dusty pink sapphire, the colour of a rose left too long inside the pages of a book, sits above a smaller champagne diamond, one resting against the other.

What holds the three together is the keepsake. A box that can be opened, a ribbon that binds, a lock that closes. Dickinson rarely sent a letter alone: there was always a flower, a shell, a blade of grass, some small physical thing to carry the words the short distance between two houses. These rings do the same work, in gold.

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.