The Morning After The Fire Swept Through

This solo exhibition by Ashwini Bhat at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles, contains a body of work that continues Bhat’s ongoing, field-based project Assembling California, a deeply personal and ecological mapping of presence, transformation, and ritual.

The exhibition features new bronze and ceramic sculptures, photographs, sound, and text, created in close relationship with the land Bhat inhabits in Northern California. Since relocating from Southern India to the Bay Area during the 2017 Tubbs Fire, the artist has embedded her practice within the rhythms of the land and the aftershocks of catastrophe. “It was a violent introduction,” Bhat reflects,“but the resilience of both the community and the redwoods inspired me to stay. I grounded my life and my practice here literally in the Bay mud.”

Living off-grid in the foothills of Sonoma Mountain with her partner, poet Forrest Gander, Bhat has spent recent years restoring their property to native habitat and observing the slow, often imperceptible cycles of nature. Her work has evolved in tandem with this attentiveness, moving inward: “The project became an inward search, a quiet animistic calibration of self with land, body with form.”

The calla lily emerges as a central motif throughout the exhibition. Though non-native, the plant thrives on Bhat’s land, dying back in the fall only to return each spring. “Dormancy,” she writes, “is not absence. It is self-containment. A sovereignty.” Her sculptures trace the calla’s life cycle—bud, bloom, burst, as metaphors for sensuality, decay, and regeneration. Many rise from wildfire, using scorched earth as their origin. Others recall artistic and spiritual lineages, from Georgia O’Keeffe to the 12th-century mystic Akka Mahadevi, who walked naked into the forest to find the sacred in trees. “These are portraits of my body, but also the land’s. Of women, mythic and real. Of my mother, who tucks a flower into her hair each morning.”

The Morning After The Fire Swept Through is not a declaration but a gesture. A listening. A divination. A bell rung gently. As Bhat writes, “What I offer here is not a solution, but an attention. A reaching.”

Images by John Janca and Gene Ogami