Inspired by many religious traditions of mourning, from The Tibetan Book of the Dead to Native American mourning rituals, the series of drawings is, in actuality, a spiritual journey begun by the artist a few days after the death of a loved one. The journey is narrated in drawings and in epigrammatic prose poetry inscribed within the images.
Memory is revealed to be so much more than mere remembrance.
For as the artist recollects the love affair, she re-creates the lover. Memory becomes the sense that gives us access to the existence of a spiritual reality and leads us to the place where the spirit lives, even when the body has disappeared. Though grief propels the imagery forward, the sense of retrieving love and creating love beyond the grip of death infuses these drawings with a luminous joy. Some have compared the journey taken in Luminous Bodies to Christ's journey through the twelve Stations of the Cross. But whereas in much Judeo-Christian philosophy the body is seen as the weak vehicle, the Achilles heel that catapults man into sin, Luminous Bodies proposes a world view that gives back to the body its sacrosanct nature.