Michon Jewelry Blog

Whenever the debate about creativity, copying, and inspiration comes up on jewelry forums, it gets heated right around the time someone says that “everything has been done already anyway” or “there’s nothing new under the sun”.

People (myself included) don’t want this to be true, because we consider ourselves to be creative, and even on some days, artists. Our work is original, and how dare anyone say it’s not?

Here’s the thing - every time I’ve come up with something I thought was completely new, I later found out someone else, somewhere in the world, had done something similar at some point in time. Not identical, but similar. And really, should I be surprised?

I thought my freeform pendants were really cutting edge, really new. I soon found out that I wasn’t the first person who thought it would be fun to twist some wire around in an abstract form and add a bead or two. Does that mean I wasn’t being creative or original? No, just that other people have had similar thought processes that resulted in similar looking jewelry. Most of the freeform wire jewelry I’ve seen doesn’t look quite like mine. Some of it I love, some of it I’m not impressed by, but I love the freeform technique, and that it lends itself to pieces turning out a little bit different every time. If I can’t be completely unique, at least I can keep coming up with new twists on things.

Same thing happened after I started doing my fused sculptural pieces in fine silver. I stumbled across a website of someone who also thought it was really fun to melt metal into abstract shapes. Again, hers didn’t look quite like mine - she’d used the technique differently - but there was the same twinge of disappointment from knowing that my idea wasn’t quite as original as I thought it was.

Argentium was the next thing I got excited about - new metal, not many people have worked with it, maybe I’d come up with a really, really new idea. That wasn’t in the cards either. Yes, Argentium has some properties that make the style of work I do easier, and yes, you wouldn’t work with sterling quite the same way (or fine silver) but the basic techniques are still things that people have been doing for a long time.

Finally when I started doing resin work, I came up with a way to use a basic technique for jewelry that really couldn’t have been done before. I cut out details from printes of my husband’s art and set them in found object bezels. Totally unique, right? Except that it wasn’t me who figured out you could set images behind resin, that’s a commonly used technique.

So I’ve come to accept the fact that, no matter how much I innovate and push the boundaries of my creativity and skill, there will be elements in my work that strongly resemble work that other people have done or are doing. I’ve decided that I have to be okay with that, and it doesn’t make my work boring or unoriginal. My jewelry does tend to be pretty unique, at least the more experimental stuff. And because of the processes I use, I’m almost guaranteed to come up with something that’s not identical to something anyone else has ever made. Even if other people have used the same techniques and materials. There is room for innovation, and as designers/artists, we have to figure out ways to keep innovating in spite of the fact that we are working with materials, ideas, and techniques that aren’t brand new.

My dream, of course, would be to discover a completely new material for jewelry and exploit all of its unique characteristics before all the other jewelers out there, many with more skill in fabrication than me, could get to it. But for now I’ll have to be satisfied with being as creative as I can with what is available to me.