Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and be empowered when wearing it. Made for Kevin Coates’ exhibition at Mobilia Gallery in 2015, “A Year of Rings,” Tempus Fugit is an extraordinary piece, inspired by Blake’s Auguries of Innocence. Coates, an incomparable master goldsmith, describes the first 4 lines of the poem as “a moving testament to human consciousness, its wonder and its frailty.”
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
The ring is 18k gold with patination and silver with an encaged hour glass comprised of two superb Ethiopian opals. Coates’ meticulous craftsmanship is evident in the beautifully carved and patinated balustrades and wings. From every view at every angle, the ring is a masterful sculpture in miniature, the back as elaborate as the front. A work of art that is also a joy to wear, the ring is a size 7 1/2 and cannot be sized.
Described by Harper’s & Queen as “Britain’s LEONARDO,” Kevin Coates has been commissioned to make work for the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, as well as His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales and Ten Downing Street.
The power of his work is best described by Sir Roy Strong, former director of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Portrait Gallery in London: “His jewels seem to belong to the world of Hermetic mystery… Those jewels are potent and meaningful objects, not to be regarded lightly, but things which have a life of their own disclosing their hidden mysteries only to the initiated. In that sense Kevin is an artist born out of time. I see him as the reincarnation of one of those scholar-creators who worked in places like the imperial workshops of Rudolfine Prague or those of the Florentine Grand Dukes of Tuscany… Perhaps we should learn to read these jewels as pregnant with some message of a new enlightenment, some latter-day revelation within the cosmic order of things which can only be transmitted by means of myth and legend, and the abstractions of mathematics and geometry.”
To purchase or to request more information, please email us at mobiliagallery@gmail.com.
| Materials | 18K gold with patination, Ethiopian opal, silver |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | Unalterable US size 7 1/2 |