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

The Ox Mountains are pre-Ice Age low lying mountains, littered with neolithic tombs. When I’m not making jewellery I paint in the surrounding landscape.

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

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

Technique

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!