Rothlu

Rothlú Jewellery is made Frances McGonigle, in the Ox Mountains, County Mayo, Ireland.

The Ox Mountains are pre-Ice Age low lying mountains, littered with neolithic tombs.

Frances studied Fine Art: Painting in the Crawford College of Art, Cork. Prior to that she  attended Grennan Mill Craft School in Kilkenny, where she discovered batik and loved it. She has experimented with this discipline and other resist techniques ever since.

Her surroundings are full of textures and hues: her  colourful lightweight jewellery is certainly inspired by all of these elements.

....“Our jewellery is patterned using Batik, Sgraffito and Shibori processes. In short, these are all resist techniques.

We generally work with batik (using wax as a resist) on cotton/linens, and shibori (using clamping and pleating as the resist) on silk. With batik we use two techniques: tjanting- essentially “drawing” with wax, and sgraffito- where we scratch into the wax before applying dyes.

Sometimes we mix two or all these techniques into one piece! One thing is certain, these methods allow for types of dyeing that yield stunning colours: some intense and luminous, others gentler and softer. Our colour palette is always evolving!‘

Frances is originally from Athlone and we are thrilled to stock her beautiful pieces.