Sara Rothwell is a multidisciplinary artist, jewellery designer and maker whose practice moves through adornment, alchemy, ritual, grief, memory and transformation.

Her relationship with jewellery began at the age of seven, when a simple bead loom sparked what would become a lifelong practice. More than two decades into her professional career, she creates bespoke jewellery, talismans and contemporary artefacts informed by mythology, animism, alchemy and Western esoteric traditions, alongside an enduring fascination with the ways we mark the significant thresholds of our lives.

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At the heart of Sara’s work is transformation.

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She works with precious metals, inherited jewellery, stones, ashes and other materials already carrying histories of their own. Through Heirloom Gold Alchemy, old and inherited gold is melted and given new form, allowing family stories to be carried forward, transformed, or sometimes consciously brought to an end. Unbound works with another kind of transition, transforming wedding and engagement jewellery after divorce or separation into something that belongs to the life being lived now.

 

Death, grief and remembrance are also integral to Sara’s practice. Her Memento Mori work creates objects that hold memory and acknowledge mortality, including memorial jewellery and pieces incorporating ashes. This work sits alongside her wider death-centred practice and training in end-of-life care. Having completed foundation training in death doula work, Sara is currently undertaking a year-long professional training in end-of-life care and death doula practice.

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These threads also extend into her work as an artist. Through jewellery, objects, animal remains, precious materials and ritual, she explores death and life, permanence and impermanence, and the liminal space in which something is no longer what it was but has not yet become what it will be.

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Sara also hosts intimate making workshops, inviting others into the process of working directly with wax to create objects by hand. These gatherings bring making back to something instinctive and embodied, where an idea can begin in the hands before being transformed through casting into metal.

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Whether creating a bespoke commission, remaking inherited gold, marking the passing of a loved one, transforming the jewellery of a former marriage, celebrating yourself and personal milestones, or holding a space in which people make together, the same enquiry runs through Sara’s work: what do we carry, what do we release, and what might we make from what remains?

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Her pieces are made to be lived with. Objects that carry memory, identity and story.

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Modern artefacts, personal talismans and small, wearable altars that accompany us through life's alchemical journey of becoming.