Five Year Plan? What Five Year Plan?

C4ward March Blogathon: Day 2 Prompt

“Where” is your creative work going? Envision yourself and your work five years or more from now.

• Who are you and what do you see your work as “being”?
• How is your work “evolving” and “becoming”?
• What about your work inspires you? Inspires others?
• Where are you going and what are you doing after this (five-year) point in the future?

The truth? I don’t have any kind of a five-year plan, artistic or business. I tend to have Artistic Attention Deficit Disorder (AADD) so what I am creating at any moment is based on what medium I feel like working in at that point and what I am inspired to create with the tools and materials available.

When I create jewelry, whether it be the glass beads & pendants, the chainmaille, or the odd mixed media concoctions, I’m trying to create items that are edgily wearable, or would that be wearably edgy? I want to create your “go-to” piece of adornment, the one that you automatically reach for whether you are wearing jeans or a business suit or a little black dress. I want to create the unique piece that becomes a part of YOU, the piece that, when other people see it. they know it’s perfect for you, and maybe the perfect piece for them is there as well.

Hunh. How about that?

My work evolves rather organically, driven by improvements in skill and technique, availability of materials, and (though it sounds rather “fluffy”) what I’m feeling from the Universe. I no longer particularly try to direct it (been there, doesn’t work). Ideas and inspiration come from many places — some of the best from my customers! — and will often have to percolate for a while before they can be attended to. Some of the best pieces both my business partner & I have made have been ones where we’ll see a bead or a component that the other made and it will trigger something in our own brain:

Thinking about this, I don’t feel any urge to worry about where I’ll be artistically in five years, or ten years, or however long I keep at this. I only feel the urge to keep an open mind and keep experimenting.