Bay Area Now 9, YBCA

Trained in literature and classical Indian dance, Ashwini Bhat is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans sculpture, installation, video, and performance. She investigates relationships between land, body, and material, often taking inspiration from Bay Area landscape. As an immigrant to the US, she conceived her ongoing project, Assembling California, as a means to build a sense of belonging to the land she now calls home. Her work around the San Andreas Fault, often paired with poetry by Forrest Gander, involves manipulating soft clay slabs directly over her own body in an act of transformation. 

The neon artwork, Belonging, complements the video work, Earth Under Our Feet, with its autobiographical sound-text. Neon derives from the earth’s crust, connecting it to other earth elements, like the pulverized clay in Rift Zone. The wall installation, San Andreas Fault: Point Reyes, incorporates a glaze Bhat created with clay dug from the fault line around Tomales Bay; it also includes embedded quartz crystals that survived the 2017 Atlas Fire in Napa County. Lovers on the Earthquake Trail, incorporates thread— used in India to assign sacrality to objects—and calla lilies and thistle, symbols of regeneration and resilience. The work uses California’s ecology and geology to address repair, community, self, and place.

—Wall text from BAN9 at YBCA

Images: John Janca