Celebrating the 2023 USA Fellows!
Ashwini Bhat has been awarded the 2023 USA Fellowship.
“The contemplative pandemic year has shown me how resilient and regenerative the studio practice can be. My practice constantly surprised me and recentered me during difficult times. The studio also became a sacred space for metabolizing transformations — of material, self, and my own purpose on this earth.”
-Ashwini Bhat
After thirty-five years in Southern India, Ashwini Bhat now works in the California Bay Area. Coming from a background in literature and classical Indian dance, Bhat uses ceramic sculptures, installations, video, and text to develop a unique visual language exploring the intersections between body and nature, self and other. In her practice, she draws from her upbringing in a rural agrarian community. Her work shows the influence of syncretic shrines and rituals, along with non-logocentric and non-Western metaphysical concepts of empathy for the nonhuman. She sees her work, in part, as an act of mapping and remapping consciousness, contributing to a spiritual or psychological archive, with an emphasis on the transformative aspects of place.
