Sunlight dances around the tiny bone fragments embedded in a diamond-shaped glass prism resting on a high wooden table in sculptor Maria Munroe’s home. The prism is made from the cremains—cremated remains--of musician Howard Wells, who composed the score for the 1962 film “Out of the Tiger’s Mouth.”

“There’s no way of controlling how the piece comes out,” Munroe says, pointing at the dispersion of ash and bubbles in the prism, the waves rippling on the surface. “It manifests itself. The personality of a person comes through. He was a musician, you know.”

The piece was made through a process called vitrification, Munroe says, converting lead crystals into a glass-like solid through the addition of additives and heat. In this case the additive used is Wells’ cremains.

Munroe designs and creates what she calls Eturns, her trademarked term combining “eternal” and “urn.” Her sculptures can be either made of or used to contain cremains of loved ones. Her memorials sit in every nook of her canopied Venice home.

The vitrified pieces have three different components: clear solid lead crystal, white ash and bubbles. Warming the vitrified piece sets the bubbles and ash in motion, integrating the three states of nature: solid, liquid and gas.

“Gas is captured inside these bubbles, which means their molecules will forever be in motion,” Munroe says of one sculpture. “It’s an active piece. It’s become totally active; the three different forms of this person co-existing simultaneously after her life.”

Many of Munroe’s sculptures embody this kinetic principle. “Maybe death isn’t as static as we think,” she says.

For the late Jeffrey Blumberg, who worked in the silver department at the auction house Christie’s, Munroe created a radiant, silver, star-like sculpture with six points. In a corner in her living room, a life-size Eturn made of ebonized pear wood has a portrait of Munroe made by artist Stephen Douglas.

“When I sat for the picture, I said to Steven, ‘Steven, take me out in time.’” The portrait was made 14 years ago, but bears a striking resemblance to the ivory-haired woman sitting on her sofa.

“It won’t hold all of me,” she says of the sculpture. “The top part here slides back and there is a wooden Eturned egg on the inside. A part of my ashes will go in there. I know it might seem a little ominous to have one for myself, but you know, I honestly believe that it’s very consoling to have this with me. Nobody has to worry about it.

“You have to live with your death on a daily basis. If you live with your death on a daily basis, and if you think about it, every minute that you are alive is so sweet, is so sweet.”

Tawny, golden and crimson fish play hide and seek among rocks in the pond in Munroe’s garden. The fish swim up with their mouths wide open gulping everything in the path. As their mouths reach the water’s surface, the fish plunge headfirst on a steep descent into the emerald blackness. The ripples sparkle in tandem with a rhythmic wind. A mammoth piece of a whale’s vertebra lies next to the pond.

Many years ago, a sparrow flew into Munroe’s fish pond and died. She took it out and buried it. A couple of months later, she dug up the bones and entombed them in a plaster-of-Paris egg.

“The bones are in here,” Munroe says, shaking the egg. She painted an eagle with its head looking up on one side, and a runic inscription on the other. “I brought it back as an eagle because it was a little sparrow, you know, so humble,” she says. “It’s going to be a work of art, so, she gets to come back as an eagle.”

Over tea, she talks about the cycle of change and transformation. “Every part of nature ages, every part of nature dies,” she says. “Some slower, some sooner, including the rocks. They will lose their shape and form and turn to dust. The water will lose its form and become another form. Everything changes.”

Munroe’s friend Laurie Frank says the Eturns are the sculptor’s way “of celebrating all the people in her life, including herself.”

“I imagine that her art was a calling, that this was a calling as much as anybody in any kind of religious service,” says Frank, curator of Frank Pictures Gallery in Santa Monica. Frank met Munroe through her husband, art dealer Aldis Browne.

Munroe worked continuously for about seven months in 1980 on a series based on her father, who was seriously ill. He survived, but when he died 10 years later, she began making Eturns.

“I didn’t really know; I hadn’t been in that place of grief, personally before,” she says. “I had only imagined it, and sensed it and been around it. To be in it is very different. He was my first one. My first person that I did was my father.”

In her work, she says, “when one is in great sadness and grief, the heart is completely open. Completely open, because of such great pain. As in love, as you know, in the state of love anything is possible. Anything is possible. It’s just infinite, and there is nothing that is impossible. The same happens in death.”

After Munroe made the Eturn for her father, a woman whose mother had just died approached her. Munroe made a wooden box to hold a blown crystal Eturn which was to be made of and contain the ashes. “It took a little time because it was the first time I had worked with a person in that state,” she says. “It’s very difficult for them and for me, and also, I am extremely nervous at all times and very cautious because it is so personal that I almost don’t, I won’t approach a person. They will have to approach me.”

Frank has long been interested in Munroe’s work, which ranges in price from $3,000 to $30,000. “Maria didn’t want to have a show,” Frank says. “She just wasn’t ready, and she felt that her collaboration with the people who had died or the families of the people who had died was so personal, and that it didn’t lend itself to having an exhibition.”

But Frank insisted, and finally convinced Munroe that her art made the entire experience of losing a loved one beautiful, rather than a dirty secret that needed to be buried. “I just knew it would give comfort and support to so many people and inspire them and move them,” Frank says.

Nothing in the show was created for the show. It was all borrowed from the families of people who had died. “It was really a gift from them to everyone who saw the work,” Frank says. “It was like all the people who had died were to have this second life. They were all so present as a part of the show.”

Cemeteries are filling up. Cremation is becoming more and more a necessity. The Catholic Church, which did not sanction cremation until 1963, expanded that sanction in 1997 to allow funeral rites even after a body was cremated.

“The minute they did that, my work took off,” says Munroe.

Opening a book- shaped, 4-foot by 3-foot copper funeral ash vessel, Munroe noted that it was for four people. “Four members of one family that will go into a family crypt up at the old mission in Santa Barbara,” Munroe says. “The cemetery is completely filled. This problem is not unique to Santa Barbara. That’s why this book.”

Munroe finds working in Los Angeles interesting “because of the influences of Hollywood. The film industry acts as the ultimate Eturn, eternally immortalizing our physicality. But the ocean will not let you forget the infinite nature of existence. Only now are people who are trying to come to terms with their mortality being able to do so. The idea of being young forever, while still attractive, is no longer the only way of life.”

Frank sees Munroe’s work as part of a changing spirituality surrounding death and mortality in Los Angeles.

“As a society, our whole attitude towards death has changed from something that’s hushed and solemn and not spoken about to a much more celebratory sense,” she says. At Munroe’s show, no one found the pieces so morbid or repulsive that they left the room “or thought it was some new age blather or ridiculed it in some way,” Frank says.

Embracing, confronting, accepting mortality through art is a centuries-old tradition. Yet, Munroe’s art is unique in that tradition as well, Frank says.

“Maria incorporates the person into their memorial,” she says. “That’s a huge step because it makes them present. It makes the dead present. Traditionally that wasn’t the case. Having the effigy of a dead person made it even more evident that they were no longer present, that they were elsewhere, that they were in the ground, or in a wall somewhere.”