Ashwini Bhat: Resonances

Assembling California, Assembling Self, will be the first monograph that traces my long-termpersonal field survey of California’s ecology in this time of climate change, shifting habitats, anddevastating forest fires. The monograph will also document two overlapping 2025 soloexhibitions, Assembling California at John Michael Kohler Arts Centre and Assembling Self atShoshana Wayne Gallery.As a transdisciplinary artist, I’m interested in ecology, species interdependencies, and place. Mywork shows the influence of syncretic shrines and rituals, along with non-logocentric and non-Western metaphysical concepts of empathy for the non-human. While I now live in the foothillsof California's Sonoma Mountains, I grew up and spent 35 years in a small, rural, agrarian, SouthIndian town, and my studio practice draws from my upbringing in that community. I hold an MAdegree in literature and translation studies, and for 17 years I trained in a 2000-year-old danceform, Bharatanatyam. Informed by this rich background in Indian dance and literature, I’ve cometo create sculptures, installations, videos, and text, and to develop a unique visual languageexploring the intersections between body and nature, self and other.Assembling California began in early 2018. The title is a homage to the eponymous book byAmerican writer John McPhee. As a new immigrant to California, deeply touched by its diverseand fragile natural environments, I found myself drawn—historically, culturally, andphysiographically—to this region’s topographies. Some of my research has taken place in thecompany of biologists and poets documenting species re-inhabiting post-fire sites in the Sierras,Yosemite, Mono Lake, Lassen Volcanic Park, and around Sonoma. Related explorationsinvolving the integration perceptual fields around Mt. Tamalpais, the San Andreas Fault, and theFairfield Osborne Preserve, have contributed to this ongoing body of work. The tumultuous,color-dappled sculptures relate to the fire-and-earthquake-altered landscape of my adopted home,California. I also connect them to the female nature spirits of my birth country, India. My large-scale sculptures appear to have been heaved upward from the earth, twisting, turbulent, mergingsensual corporeality with tectonic drama. Here the human body and the geologically activeCalifornia landscape become one thing. Those works also bring into play thread— used in Indiato assign sacrality to objects—and Calla Lilies, symbols of regeneration. Some of the large scaleinstallations include collaborations with Pulitzer Prize winning writer Forrest Gander, whosepoems appear as a kind of word-detritus strewn along the central rift of a fault zone created bythe sculptural components.I’m inspired by philosophical thought that challenges the privileging of human existence over thenon-human. I believe that at this critical moment, we need a chorus of voices—not only fromscientists, but from artists and others— for our culture to adjust its disastrously short-termthinking about climate change, species mutuality, and our interdependence. I see this project asan act of mapping and remapping, contributing to a spiritual or psychological archive derivedfrom a vital contemplation of place; of re-imagining identity while articulating the symbioticrelationship between humans and place.