Daily Confidential (1999-2006)

The images used in this series of jewelry pieces are appropriated from a pulp magazine printed during the 1950’s titled Secrets.  The magazine photos were overly dramatic and stagy, both tragic and unintentionally comic, but somehow they captured the zeitgeist regarding female transgression.  These reconfigured images freeze a moment in the daily drama of our lives and, set as jewels, they serve as paeans to the mundane.

By converting these images to enamel decals (and firing them onto the surface) I can exploit the historical conventions of enameled portrait miniatures, and, in particular, 18th century decal transfers.  Hand-painted enamel portrait miniatures were luxury items but with the development of the decal transfer process, in the mid-18th century, such jewels were affordable to a wider audience.  Then as now the enameled image serves to provide a democratized view of time and place.