Let us walk, together.
To say that the transdisciplinary practice of Ashwini Bhat, spanning ceramic sculptures and installations, videos, and performance, is deeply entangled with the artist’s respect for the natural world—that is, the organic, the non-human, and the more-than human—is to speak one partial truth. With this truth, we can begin to understand how Bhat’s walks along her local Northern California landscape—through towering thickets of redwoods and across forest floors once scorched by flames, now teeming with new life—embedded themselves deep into the folds of her abstract ceramic sculptures and across the skin of their sinuous forms and textured surfaces. Tracing this path alongside Bhat, we expand the possibility of understanding the self in its expanded field, a “self that touches all edges,” to quote Wallace Stevens. [1]
Across two significant bodies of self-portraits, Self Portrait, Tree of Life and Self Portrait, Yakshi Series, both from 2023, Bhat articulates a philosophy of the self that is connected to, yet distinct and autonomous from, the natural world, expressing this philosophy through the formal poetics of her installation. Tree of Life arrays individual glazed ceramic fragments and wall texts in a manner reminiscent of a tree of life, drawing from both the popularized iconography of the banyan tree and an image of a peepal tree carved on a clay seal from the ancient Indus Valley civilization of Harappa. Centuries-old motifs thus come together in a familiar image, but the very formation of the work is idiosyncratic to the artist, who molded each individual clay fragment by laying thinly stretched, wet clay along the contours of her body, treating the material like a second skin—coterminous, yet distinct.
Ashwini Bhat, Yakshi series, Ceramic sculptures, variable, 2023
The Self Portrait: Yakshi Series (2023) builds on the porous, fluid relation between the self and nature by invoking the titular female nature spirits, which are derived from pre-Aryan spiritual traditions and found throughout Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain practices. Often regarded as vengeful manifestations of human women who were wronged in life, yakshi take on multiple, shifting forms and embody the dual forces of sensuality and strength. In Bhat’s sculptures, such a dualism manifests through the abstracted ceramic vessels, from which emerge recognizable blossoms of flora found in her California setting. Each flower bears symbolic significance in its distinctive colors and shapes: the calla lily, for instance operates in its fiery, resplendent red as a symbol of regeneration, an efflorescence borne in flames.
Ashwini Bhat, Self Portrait, Yakshi (Calla Lily), Detail, Ceramic sculpture, 23 x 6 x 5 inches, 2023
Bhat, who trained in classical dance form of Bharatnatyam for nearly two decades, has here designed a careful choreography between figurative and abstract form, across rich colors, and indeed, across two distinct geographic and cultural landscapes, drawing as much from the terrain of California, where she has been living since 2017, and that of her own rich South Indian heritage. In doing so, the artist nimbly brings to bear in her work what the Martinican theorist Édouard Glissant termed the “poetics of relation.” As the writer Manthia Diawara has noted, Glissant eschewed the notion of difference as the “oppositional discourse of the same and the other,” and instead theorized difference as “an assembler of the ‘dissimilar.”[2] Put another way: to be in relation is not to flatten distinctions nor to erect rigid boundaries between entities and categories, but to respect what is dissimilar and unique in the Other while at the same time maintaining the possibility to move with and across differences. Glissant’s poetics of relation thus privileges the ever-present potential for connection over isolation.
Take a step further.
If Bhat has so far ushered us along a path toward embracing the contingent nature of our presence on earth through the possibilities afforded by ceramics—a practice which entails the transmogrification of earth to clay via the heat of flames, hardening minerals into new forms—then that journey is also one that encourages us leap across vast times and distances. In Her Nature, Bhat harkens toward iconographic forms found in temple architecture across South India through the third suite of works, a set of three self-portraits that draw inspiration from the decorative pillars and wall sculptures from Hindu temples across South India. In this methodology—as well as in the inspiration Bhat draws from yakshi mythology, and her attention to organic forms—Bhat is formally and spiritually connected to the practice of Indian modernist sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee (1949-2015), whose massive figures of spirits, animals, and plants constructed in organic and synthetic fibers, bronze, and clay drew heavily from Mukherjee’s careful study and documentation of the statuesque figures adorning Indian temples. Indeed, as the curator and art historian Shanay Jhaveri has written, Mukherjee’s attention to both the efflorescence of natural phenomena and Indian mythological iconography were two modes through which the artist imbued her sculptures with “auratic excess,” a way of blending craft and fine art forms to gesture toward the immense presence of her works—a presence that was once historical and mythic, modern and ancient, tactile and cerebral. [3]
Ashwini Bhat, Self Portrait, Nagalinga Pushpa, Ceramic sculpture, 68 x 24 x 24 inches, 2023
We may regard Bhat’s sculptural practice as hewing to a similar tradition, though with several important distinctions. For Self-Portrait, Nagalinga Pushpa and Self-Portrait, Nude Pouring Water, both 2023, Bhat incorporates sacred architectural forms—in the former work, the phallic lingam, a symbol of the virility of Shiva—with bright purple silk fabric, thus interlacing forms and materials historically coded, in the Western gaze, as masculine and feminine, respectively. Bhat’s emphasis here effectively destabilizes the rigidity of these categories and presents them not just as connected but importantly, as necessarily mutually co-constitutive. Such an emphasis on mutuality and interlaced materiality comes together beautifully in Self-Portrait as My Mother (2023), where Bhat has dangled a set of ghungroo, or bells, from the tip of a knotted ceramic braid bedecked with a vibrant pink jasmine blossom. The reference here is deeply personal, a paean to the artist’s mother who cares for her own jasmine plants and, like many South Indian women, often adorns her hair with the fragrant flower.
Ashwini Bhat, Self Portrait as my Mother, Ceramic sculpture, 36 x 20 x 5 inches, 2023
Come further and let yourself be open to new directions.
An audience that not primed to the cultural specificity of Bhat’s formal and historical references may nevertheless discover that through the sculptor’s careful gestures, they are drawn to the seductive materiality of Bhat’s sculptures—the slick, glazed surfaces, often grooved with indentations, pockmarks and other indices of the artists’ hand—and from this initial invitation, the audience meets new terrains of thought and understanding. The audience is therefore a collaborator and co-conspirator alongside the artist, and such a spirit of collaboration informs Fabluae, a set of works made with the poet and art critic Ranjit Hoskote. Comprising five sculptures by Bhat with five corresponding texts by Hoskote, this joining of forms—text and sculpture—organically moves through several stages of metamorphosis in a processual illustration of transformations across homologous structures in nature. In biology, the study of homology entails the examination of change from a common origin point. In Bhat and Hoskote’s collaboration, we as the audience witness the changes from the first sculpture to the fifth; across the texts, each a variation of 40 words, homologous changes occur at the level of diction. No rules dictated these transformations beyond the word count, but what transpired struck a balance continuity and openness to change. “You start with one form,” Bhat says, “and the reminiscence has to be carried out into the next.” [4]
Ashwini Bhat, Fabulae 5, In Collaboration with Ranjit Hoskote, Ceramic sculpture, 11.5 x 16 x 4 inches, 2023
The reminiscence has to be carried out into the next. In thinking of Bhat’s words, we become aware of the stakes of comparison and similarity, of the urgent task of understanding what it means to be in sympathetic relation with the Other—of what it means to honor difference and let ourselves be open to transformation. Across so many spiritual practices in the Indian subcontinent and globally, transformation is the only consistency in a physical and psychic world defined by roiling change. And thus, Ashwini Bhat’s gestures in the fifth movement of Her Nature speak to the necessary element of contingency that defines a poetics of relation.
The fifth and final movement of Her Nature comprises a new, titular two-channel video work in which the artist takes up the spirit and of the twelfth-century female revolutionary poet Akka Mahadevi. Known in her time for her ascetic practice that renounced worldly pleasures for a deeper communion with nature, Mahadevi’s life and texts offer for Bhat a model of transcendent relation, in which shared sympathies between humans and the natural world transcend the arbitrary distinctions of physical form, connected instead by a vibrant vitality. Across the two screens and accompanied by a soundtrack by noted cellist Theresa Wong, viewers witness close, introspective views of the California landscape that allow the many seemingly binaries of the natural world to be understood anew as harmonic entanglements: the rough surfaces of stones articulating curved forms, the fractures of tree bark contributing to the towering scales of redwoods. Amidst these congruences and departures are glimpses of Bhat’s own communion with nature, a practice that is idiosyncratically hers yet connected to traditions long past, a union of scales both distant and ever so near.
Ashwini Bhat, Her Nature, Still, Two channel video with sound 6 minutes 2023
In mapping the many movements of Her Nature, this essay has been an attempt to mark the intellectual and art historical investments of Ashwini Bhat’s ever-expanding practice. Yet, what the text cannot substitute is what remains so central to Bhat’s practice: the inclinations and predilections of bodies, and how they marshal and put into play the set of affects unique to each individual. The essay takes one chronological route, but it is the ambition of this author that the essay, like Bhat’s practice, may also clear the paths of many more routes, or what avid hikers refer to as desire paths. Desire paths are drawn from the actions of individuals who diverge from an established route and through the actions of individuals over time, create entirely new paths for others to follow. Ashwini Bhat’s sculptures, textual collaborations, videos, and collaborative artistic practice gathers the many relations that can be formed and reformed from these multiple desires, from the interactions between and within bodies and the natural world. In so doing, the artist upholds the ethical principle of recognizing difference without distinction between humans and nature, modeling an equanimity that can extend to every fragment of daily life.
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[1] Wallace Stevens, “A Rabbit as the King of Ghosts,” Poetry, Vol. 51, NO. 6: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Number (October 1937). Accessed via Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/21816/a-rabbit-as-king-of-the-ghosts.
[2] Manthia Diawara, “Édouard Glissant’s Worldmentality: An Introduction to One World in Relation,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 42-43 (November 2018), 20-27: 26. https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-7185713
[3] Shanay Jhaveri, “Phenomenal Forces of Nature,” in Mrinalini Mukherjee, ed. Shanay Jhaveri (London: The Shoestring Publisher, 2018), 11-64: 26.
[4] Interview with author, November 29, 2023.
