Portrait photo by Forrest Gander.
January 24, 2023
Transdisciplinary Artist
Penngrove, CA
2023 USA Fellow
This award was generously supported by the Windgate Foundation.
USA Fellowships are annual $50,000 unrestricted awards recognizing the most compelling artists working and living in the United States, in all disciplines, at every stage of their career.
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.
