Tenth Elegy is not a painting but a mixed media piece. Unfortunately I do not have any professional photos of this work.
I thought that this body of work could be answered in a wedding ring. Rilke's poems are dense with images and sentiments. How to find a work that ties all of this together?
I love the simplicity of weddings rings, but of all the jewellery pieces, it is one that holds the most significance, a cultural and an emotional object. One that is laden with meaning especially for the wearer. For some people it is the only piece of jewellery that they will ever wear. But it holds much more than the value of the material. Experiences, relationships, memories are all held within it's form. In Tenth Elegy, I imagined a wedding ring that had experiences and memories coming out of it. Because of the era of the photos and the poems by Rilke, I felt that there needed to be a formality to this idea. So I joined the different elements together by a series of lines (which were crocheted lines) and pulled the lines so that they were quite tight, so that there would be a tension between the pieces.
The objects that I made, referenced both the poems and my grandmother's photos. Birds, urns, a bouquet of roses, ferns, a linear house, a shell fragment, a cross, are some of the elements that make up this piece.
Tenth Elegy
9ct yellow gold, sterling silver, copper, wire, enamel paint, beads, thread, found object
950 x 450 x 900mm