The Long Story Short

A few months ago, as I was preparing for a new market I was messaged by another local artist asking if I had time to talk in the next week. I agreed to chat but was surprised because this artist hardly ever interacted with me, so I wasn’t sure what there would be to talk about. Although I did ask a few times if there was anything wrong, the artist only gave vague answers to the effect of “it’s about earrings and I just have some things I want to talk about”. I didn’t really know what that meant, so I offered to face time. It didn’t go unnoticed though that a friend of this artist had followed my account just an hour before and that they were on a friend’s trip together.

Sadly, the conversation would be about the artist’s perceived similarities of my art to theirs. I do admit that the conversation was polite, and they weren’t antagonistic. In addition, I completely went into fawn response since I was kind of taken aback and heavily sleep deprived from market prepping.

After we ended the call I had a lot of feelings, but mostly I was hurt that the artist felt I was maybe taking ‘unintentional’ inspiration from their art—that I could not have possibly thought of using pearls or making mushrooms and bouquets with bows on my own. *Note: They did not really outright say the latter half, but I think them finding this conversation necessary to have implies it.

The artist also felt concerned that since I was doing more markets that people might make their own connection/conclusion between my art and their designs. This honestly hurt a lot to hear because I put a great deal into planning and perfecting my technique for each earring. And so, due to this hurt coupled with the artist having a much bigger following than me, I decided to pull out from markets all together. All the hard work, late nights I was putting into the market felt tainted. I didn’t want to continue with the feeling that my work would be compared or that I would need to run my designs by them first out of courtesy.

You might be asking yourself, “what’s the point of this— oversharing on the internet over earrings?” I’m not sure that there is a point! I just want to put this out there and defend myself in advance since I will be continuing to make art that I want to make. I’m sure that as I make a habit of being more active on this website and on IG, you will see all the effort I’ve put into my art and my style.

Lastly, while I do think my earrings are very cute, they are just a stepping stone towards more meaningful art.

P.S. The day before the Face time, I posted to my Story that I was going to slowly transition away from earrings due to the repetitive nature of making in batches. However, since I decided to de-prioritize selling all together, I have retracted this statement. I will continue to make earrings (in addition to other things), and I will be sharing all my polymer clay earring knowledge that I’ve learned over the past 5 years. I would rather be a resource to encourage people to be their own artist rather than gate-keep.