Ashwini Bhat

Coming from a background in literature and classical Indian dance, transdisciplinary artist Ashwini Bhat (she/her) uses sculptures, installations, video, and text to develop a unique visual language that explores the intersections between body and nature, self and other. Bhat is a 2024 John S. Knudsen Prize winner and a 2023 United States Artists Fellow. She has also received a Howard Foundation Award for Sculpture and a McKnight Foundation Residency Fellowship. In 2023, she became a certified naturalist at the Fairfield Osborne Preserve, a research site for Sonoma State University’s Center for Environmental Inquiry.

In her practice, Bhat draws from her upbringing in a rural agrarian community. Her work shows the influence of syncretic shrines and rituals and non-logocentric and non-Western metaphysical concepts of empathy for the nonhuman. She sees her work, in part, as an act of mapping and remapping consciousness and contributing to a spiritual or psychological archive with an emphasis on the transformative aspects of place.

After 35 years in Southern India, Bhat now lives and works in the foothills of Sonoma Mountain, California. Bhat is represented by Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles, California, and Project 88, Mumbai, India.