The Earth Under Our Feet

“Earth Under Our Feet,” by Ashwini Bhat, is a video installation in response to questions of belonging. It is reflective of the artist’s own journey and her search for a personal sense of place, a home. Her performance video is a poetic intervention exploring questions of collective identities, materiality, fragility, and impermanence. By projecting the video on a raw clay surface and by juxtaposing her own brown body with the brown clay body, she urges the viewers to notice our entangled and ethical connection to the ground we stand on. The autobiographical text is intended to be a mantra, a prayer, a meditation on belonging as a spiritual quest. The process is inspired by South Asian practices of foot-wedging clay. The title is from the notebooks of George Oppen, an American Objectivist poet, who wrote, “The earth under our feet; we are not asked to begin nowhere.”

“Earth Under Our Feet,” performance is inspired by the symbol of mandala and by the concept of impermanence. During the performance, Bhat created an ephemeral installation of unfired clay that models our connectedness as it was shaped by audience participation. Through immersion and movement, this project invited participants to notice our entangled relation with others and with the very ground we stand on.

Images: John Janca and Ashwini Bhat

Noozhawk >

Variable West >

New City Art >

An excerpt from Pia Singh’s essay “Where She Comes From” >

Ashwini Bhat’s site-specific installation “Being, Longing…” at the Palo Alto Art Center, includes a newly created large-scale glazed ceramic mandala (Collective Earth) created by public participation in a performance (Earth Under Our Feet) during the 2025 community festival Montalvo Funk at Montalvo Arts Center.