After thirty-five years in Southern India, artist Ashwini Bhat now lives and works in the foothills of Sonoma Mountain, California. With a background in literature, translation, and classical Indian dance, she primarily creates sculptures in clay and bronze. Her practice often extends into installations that combine sculpture with video, text, and performance, forming a distinctive visual language that explores the relationships between body and nature, and 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.