After thirty-five years in Southern India, transdisciplinary artist, Ashwini Bhat now lives and works in the foothills of Sonoma Mountain, California. Coming from a background in literature, translation, and classical Indian dance, Bhat works in clay and bronze, often creating large-scale installations with sculpture, video, text, and performance, developing a unique visual language to explore the intersections between body and nature, self and other. Her practice draws from her rural agrarian community upbringing. Her work is influenced by syncretic shrines, rituals, and non-Western metaphysical concepts of empathy for the non-human. Bhat’s work, in part, is an act of (re)mapping consciousness, contributing to a spiritual or psychological archive, with an emphasis on the transformative aspects of place. Bhat is a is a 2024 John S. Knudsen Prize winner from Crocker Art Museum and a 2023 United States Artists Fellow. She is a certified Naturalist at the Fairfield Osborne Preserve, a research site for Sonoma State University’s Center for Environmental Inquiry. Bhat is represented by Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles, USA, and Project 88, Mumbai, India.