Rooted in her upbringing in agrarian South India and shaped by training in classical Indian dance, literature, and translation, Bay Area artist Ashwini Bhat explores themes of resilience, regeneration, and the entanglement of body and land. Drawing from ancestral traditions that revere fire as a transformative force, Bhat works primarily with clay and bronze—materials that undergo metamorphosis through fire. Her practice often extends into installations that combine sculpture with video, text, and performance, forming a distinctive visual language that reflects an animistic relationship between self, material, and place.

Bhat’s work is exhibited nationally and internationally and can be seen in the collections of the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor; Newport Art Museum, RI; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, India; and Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, Japan, among others. Bhat’s first monograph, Resonances, published by Radius Books in collaboration with the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, traces her artistic journey over the past decade since establishing roots in the foothills of Sonoma Mountain, California.

Bhat is a is a 2024 John S. Knudsen Prize winner from Crocker Art Museum and a 2023 United States Artists Fellow. She is a certified Naturalist at the Fairfield Osborne Preserve, a research site for Sonoma State University’s Center for Environmental Inquiry. Bhat is represented by Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles, USA, and Project 88, Mumbai, India.