Imaging Pilgrimage: Art as Embodied Experience

While place-based pilgrimage is an embodied practice, it can be experienced in its fullness through built environments, assemblages of souvenirs, and music. Imaging Pilgrimage explores contemporary art that is created after a pilgrimage and intended to act as a catalyst for the embodied experience of others. Each chapter focusses on a contemporary artwork that links one landscape to another-from the Spanish Camino to a backyard in the Pacific Northwest, from Lourdes to South Africa, from Jerusalem to England, and from Ecuador to California. The close attention to context and experience allows for popular practices like the making of third-class or contact relics to augment conversations about the authenticity or perceived power of a replica or copy; it also challenges the tendency to think of the original in hierarchic terms.

Imaging Pilgrimage brings various fields into conversation by offering a number of lenses and theoretical approaches (materialist, kinaesthetic, haptic, synaesthetic) through which to engage objects that become sites activated through religious and ritual praxis and negotiated with not just the eyes, but a multiplicity of senses.