Location: Penngrove, CA (Sonoma Mountain foothills)
Medium: Sculpture, installation, ceramics, bronze, video, performance
Website: ashwinibhat.com
Ashwini Bhat was born in Puttur, Karnataka, India, and spent thirty-five years in Southern India before immigrating to the United States. She holds a master’s degree in literature and translation studies from Bangalore University and trained for seventeen years in Bharatanatyam, the classical Indian dance form, including professional performance. She later transitioned fully to visual art, establishing a practice centered on sculpture and installation. She now lives and works in the foothills of Sonoma Mountain in Penngrove, California, where she is also a certified naturalist at the Fairfield Osborne Preserve, a research site for Sonoma State University’s Center for Environmental Inquiry.
Bhat has received numerous honors recognizing her practice, including the 2023 United States Artists Fellowship, the 2024 John S. Knudsen Prize from the Crocker Art Museum, the 2022 Julia Terr Fellowship, the 2021 McKnight Artist Residency Fellowship, and the 2013 Howard Foundation Fellowship for Sculpture. Her first artist monograph, Resonances, was co-published by Radius Books and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, the Newport Art Museum, the Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park in Japan, the FuLe International Ceramic Art Museum in China, and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in India, among others.
Bhat works primarily in clay and bronze, creating large-scale sculptures and installations that incorporate video, text, and performance. Her practice investigates the entanglement of body and land, drawing on her agrarian upbringing in South India, syncretic shrine traditions, and non-Western metaphysical thought to examine resilience, regeneration, and animistic relationships between self, material, and place. As an immigrant building a new home in California, she conceived her ongoing project Assembling California as a means of belonging through sustained artistic and ecological engagement with the landscapes she now inhabits—including research along the San Andreas Fault and in fire-scarred terrain across the state.
Her work is distinguished by its integration of geological and biological materials—clay dug from fault lines, quartz salvaged from wildfires, brass bells from classical Indian dance—alongside poetry (frequently in collaboration with her partner, the writer Forrest Gander) and video. The calla lily appears repeatedly across her sculptures and bronze castings as a symbol of regeneration and the alliance between the female body and nature. Bhat has described her practice as “an act of (re)mapping consciousness,” and her installations frequently engage fire as a transformative force drawn from ancestral traditions.
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