Project Two - Well, Onward and Upward Ay Folkies

As often happens with these projects, I find myself ending up with a significantly different idea to where I started.
Instead of something almost completely unrelated to me, I shall change my narrative to something a lot more personal, a question I, and, I am sure, many others like me, have asked ourselves again and again during our journey of artistic discovery.
When am I an artist, and not just someone who makes art?
When am I an artist, and not just a student?
Have I always been an artist, or is that some goal I must aim towards and reach?
When am I an artist.

Does this question even have an answer though, or is it something that becomes a personal choice, do I, and only I, decide when I become an artist? Or is it a collective decision of everyone who views my work, to decide whether I, the creator, am an artist, or just person who creates art.

Enough waffling on.

I will design something, still a form of jewellery, that somehow speaks to me about this question, and portrays the changing story, from the level of unawareness of the untrained "artist" through a gaining of understanding, to a point of, well, enlightenment about this question. There may or may not ever be a real answer to this, but I believe a certain level of understanding can be reached about it, and that is what I wish to portray.

Because it has to be a series, I shall do three pieces (must be at least three to be a series) But I do not want to do more than three pieces, because three will give me a before, now, and after of where I believe I am in my own search for the answer to this question.
When I started at NMIT creative industries I did not really know what an artist was, I just wanted to make stuff, and I thought that artists just made stuff that looked nice. Now I know to be an artist one has to do more than just make nice stuff, whether it's drawings, or sculptures, or anything else. There is more than one type of "art". I thought I knew this, I mean, painting isn't the same as drawing, or photography, or jewellery making, but that is not what I mean by different types of art now. Someone can make a nice, pretty piece of work, they can put alot of effort into it, then sell it to someone to sit in their house and match the garden, or the colours in the lounge.
Or someone can make a portrait of someone or something, a family member or a pet, basically like a photograph for a memory, or memorial, but a different skill, and hence different connotations and atmosphere.
Or someone can make something to pass on an idea, or a feeling, or in some other way put deeper meaning into a piece of art.
These are some of the ways, I believe, that there are different kinds of art.
I know this now, and I cannot imagine much more, I cannot imagine how far art could go, and I believe that is the final stage, there is no end to art, but when a person can accept and image this endless concept, then they have found their answer to the question.

This is what I want my piece to say.

I want it to talk about how one shapes their imagination and knowledge just as one may shape their mind and discover more about themselves through meditation. It may be said that imagination is limitless, but once we start to grow, and learn, we start to limit ourselves, we are confined within our own perspective, and we need to learn how to, well, how to think outside the square.