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.
Ashwini Bhat : RESONANCES >
Resonances is the first monograph by transdiscplinary artist Ashwini Bhat and traces her long-term personal survey of California’s ecology in this time of climate change, shifting habits, and devastating forest fires. This monograph weaves a comprehensive selection of images of Bhat's work with newly commissioned essays by Leah Ollman, Glenn Adamson, Jenni Sorkin that contextualize her practice in relation to the worlds of poetry, ceramic craft, and Californian art history, respectively. These longer essays are interspersed with shorter texts by Chava Maeve Krivchenia, Padma Dorje Maitland, and Tausif Noor that focus on Bhat's recent exhibitions, new chapters in this ongoing body of work. Resonances is published by Radius Books and co-published with the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.