The Letter That Admits Defeat

On opening night there will be a letter waiting for every guest at Yours Truly, a desk at the back of the gallery with stamps and stickers, and someone to address it to. Write to them, and we will post it the next morning. The premise of the show is that this is harder than it sounds, and Tilda Cole has chosen the letter that says so out loud.

Hers is from Vladimir Nabokov to Véra Slonim, written early, before the marriage that would last the rest of his life.

"My tenderness, my happiness, what words can I write for you? How strange that although my life’s work is moving a pen over paper, I don’t know how to tell you how I love, how I desire you. Such agitation: and such divine peace: melting clouds immersed in sunshine, mounds of happiness. And I am floating with you, in you, aflame and melting, and a whole life with you is like the movement of clouds, their airy, quiet falls, their lightness and smoothness, and the heavenly variety of outline and tint, my inexplicable love. I cannot express these cirrus-cumulus sensations."

It is a letter about the failure of language, written by one of the great prose stylists of the century. He piles up images, abandons each one, and ends by admitting the whole attempt has failed.

Her answer is the With Love Ring: 9ct yellow gold, set with a 1.25ct Australian zircon on a 3mm organic band.

Zircon is the older stone, and the more talkative one. It has greater fire than a diamond, which is to say it breaks light into more colours rather than fewer, and it does not resolve into a single clean flash. Nabokov wrote clouds, sunshine, mounds, flame, and then said none of it would do. The ring makes the same attempt and gets away with it, because a stone is allowed to say several things at once.

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.