KILKENNY DESIGN

Martina Hamilton is a first generation jewellery maker, a creator from the vanguard of emerging contemporary Irish artisan jewellery making in the 1990s, whose universal appeal now engages and touches every generation.

Martina graduated with a BA in Fine Art Sculpture from ATU Sligo in 1988. She registered her makers mark with the Assay Office of Ireland in 1989, setting up her first workshop in her family home in Lissadell the same year. She opened her jewellery workshop and craft shop called ”The Cat and The Moon” and the Hamilton Art Gallery some years later. Martina has grown her iconic brand over the last thirty years and now employs 20 people through her Goldsmith studio workshop, retail outlet and art gallery located in the heart of Sligo.

Martina combines her early training in Fine Art Sculpture with her Jewellery Design skills, earning multiple awards for style, elegance, and approach she takes to jewellery designs. The randomness and ferocity of the environment where she lives, at the edge of the Atlantic ocean in County Sligo, informs and sustains all of her work. Fragments of broken shells, striations in sand on a coastal beach, mooring links on an Atlantic harbour, wall the purity of balled rainwater on a leaf, or a sudden bend in a stream, such randomness provides a narrative inspiration to be wrought into suites of silver and gold jewellery.