Introduction to Marleena Barran Design

Most of my friends and customers know me from being a blacksmith who makes iron & silver jewellery that I sell in a Etsy shop called Taitaya. I have a wide variety of interests and one of the earliest ones was in graphic arts, painting and drawing. As the time to give birth to my daughter approaches and I find it more difficult to move and work I looked into alternatives of what I can do creatively instead during these last months of my old life and the first new months of my daughters new life.

This is where I returned to my roots. I have a range of designs that I created 2006 for a series of cast jewellery, based on mythology and shamanic inspired pictures of animals. I have sold a few pieces that I painstakingly sand cast out of those designs, but most of them I never released into the public. Some of those designs have proven to be desirable and got borrowed via social media, unbeknownst to me at the time. So I thought why let them sleep unknown in my sketch book for another 8 years.

Partly to this premise my new Etsy shop "Marleena Barran Design" was born. I would not be honest if I said this was not a commercial venture, but there is also ideology behind my shop, which is the main aspect that I will focus on this blog.

I spend a lot of time reading the Etsy forums and initially it was surprising to me the sheer volume of posts concerning copyright and the work of Etsy shop owners being copied, without permission. As an artist I feel the pain, but at the same time I was unsure on how it would ever be possible to control what we release into the internet.

My stint of Art school happened at a time, when the internet did not really feature in art. Even my then teacher was sceptical about whether the completely digital painting could even be considered art. The world has changed since then and now thanks to my new shop I find myself immersed in the world of copyright, public domain, creative commons and a whole lot of legal jargon.

 So this blog is an attempt to explore this wild west of intellectual and artistic expression and the concept of intellectual property in a digital world from the view point of an artist trying to make a living, but also from the view point of an artist who's entire production is based on the art, culture and knowledge of our ancestors. A creative Public Domain of works that is eroding the same rate as the blue slip clay cliffs around the Island I live on.

Welcome and please feel free to join in on the conversation.