The Morning After The Fire Swept Through

I first arrived from southern India to Northern California during the Tubbs Fire in 2017. It was a violent introduction, but the resilience of both the community and the redwoods inspired me to stay. I grounded my life and my practice here—literally—in the bay mud. Assembling California, my ongoing field-based project, began as a way to belong. Over nearly a decade, it's become an ecological, spiritual, and artistic mapping of place, presence, and transformation.

Since 2021, I’ve lived off-grid in Penngrove—an unincorporated town in the foothills of Sonoma Mountain—with my partner, poet Forrest Gander. We’ve been restoring the land to native habitat—welcoming pollinators, birds, and wildness back in. As my ritual walks deepened into studio rhythms, I became more attuned to microclimates, to changes barely perceptible except through daily return. The project evolved into an inward search, a quiet calibration of self with land, body with form.

I began work on this exhibition the week after the 2024 elections, feeling paralyzed. Each morning I walked with my cats, Jalebi and Jamoon, then entered the studio and rolled a small ball of clay in my palms—just to feel something. These became my beads: 108 in all. Joined by breast-shaped seed pods, cast Rudraksha, and a calla lily, they form a spiral rosary in clay and bronze. A ritual of devotion, touch, and daily return.

Throughout, the calla lily recurs. Although non-native to this region, it dies down in the fall only to return stronger each spring. I meditated beside it every day. Dormancy, I realized, is not absence. It is self-containment. A sovereignty. These works take shape from that awareness. They are portraits of my body, but also the land’s. Of women, mythic and real. Of my mother, who tucks a flower into her hair each morning. Of Akka Mahadevi, the 12th-century mystic who walked naked into the forest to find the sacred in trees.

The forms—bud, bloom, burst—trace the life cycle of the calla lily and its metaphors: sensuality, decay, regeneration. Many emerge from imagined wildfire—scorched earth as birthplace. Others honor the lineage of artists like Georgia O’Keeffe, or return to the ancient technique of bronze casting I once studied in Southern India. Clay, wax, bronze: each a translation of form and material, each echoing my own migrations.

The exhibition includes bronze and ceramic sculptures, photographs, sound, and text—nearly all new works. It marks another chapter of my epic project, Assembling California: a practice shaped by dailiness, by slowness, and by the persistent desire to be in relation—with the land, with the body, with what’s more-than-human. What I offer here is not a solution, but an attention. A reaching. A listening. A bell rung gently in the morning after fire.

–    Ashwini Bhat