December 2, 2023
by Kate Mothes
Ashwini Bhat explores the elemental relationship between earth and fire
When Ashwini Bhat first visited the U.S. from her small, rural hometown in southern India in 2012, she knew only two people in the country. Three years later, she migrated on an artistic merit visa, and in 2017, she was ready to set down roots in Petaluma, Sonoma County, California. In October of that year, the catastrophic Tubbs Fire swept through neighboring Santa Rosa, burning much of it to the ground. “While it was terrifying, I was deeply moved by the way the community came together to help one another,” the artist says. “Until the Tubbs Fire encounter, I had thought of fire mostly as a generative force. But observing the devastation in Santa Rosa, I found myself wanting to better understand the phenomena of forest fires and the complex natural history of California.”
Starting in 2018, Bhat endeavored to learn as much as she could about the nature of forest fires, teaming up with biologists who were documenting how post-fire sites were gradually re-inhabited. This experience spurred the artist’s ongoing project Assembling California, comprising what she calls a “a personal, artistic field survey of California’s ecology in a time of climate change, shifting habitats, and devastating forest fires.”
Assembling California borrows its title from John McPhee’s 1994 narrative of California’s geologic and human time, documented via trips over the course of fifteen years with tectonicist Eldridge Moores, as they traversed fault lines through a range of the state’s diverse landscapes. Through her own observations, Bhat says, “I started thinking through images, textures, and the smells of forests and the human body—the relatedness of my own brown skin to the wood and the land—and my sculptures took shape in reference to my long-term reflections on the interdependency of species.”
