Ashwini Bhat • January 9, 2021

“The eye sees what it is trained to see.” 
John McPhee, Assembling California 

Ashwini Bhat’s new work, “Assembling California,” is a documentation of her personal, artistic field survey of California’s ecology in this time of climate change, shifting habitats, and devastating forest fires. As a new immigrant to California, deeply touched by its diverse and fragile natural environments, she has found herself and her studio practice drawn— historically, culturally, physiographically—to this region’s topographies. Some of her research has taken place in the company of biologists and poets documenting species re-inhabiting post-fire sites in the Sierras, Yosemite, Mono Lake, and around Sonoma. Related explorations—thinking about large scale forces, geological time, and interrelated symmetries —have led to this current and ongoing body of sculpture, installation, photography, and video.

Ashwini Bhat, an artist based in Petaluma, California, holds an M.A degree in literature and had an earlier career in classical Indian dance. She studied with American expatriate Ray Meeker in Pondicherry, India. Bhat’s work explores the deep relationship between the constructed and the inherent. She often introduces radical but somehow familiar forms to suggest a complex interplay between landscape, human, and non-human forms. 

Bhat is the curator for the Scripps Ceramics Annual 2021. Since 2016, AMOCA has partnered with the Williamson Gallery at Scripps College to produce exhibitions of works by guest curators of the Scripps College Ceramic Annual.