Ashwini Bhat
Photograph by Forrest Gander, courtesy of Shoshana Wayne Gallery.
Potters speak of the “clay body”—the stuff from which the work is made. Some take a step further, considering the anthropomorphic potential of the vessel, which, after all, has lips, a belly, and a foot. Ashwini Bhat has completed this circuit of thinking, making objects that can be conceived as equal partners to the human form: partners in a dance. Dance was, in fact, her first métier. Bhat grew up Kerala, India, and there trained in a traditional form of choreography called Bharatanatyam. Still today, the lessons it imparted to her about stance, movement, and gesture in space, remain important to her work.
The works included here are from a series called Assembling California—a title taken from the writer John McPhee—and are inspired by the landscape of the West, which Bhat has lately explored. She describes them as a kind of “field survey of this place, its complex geology, and its whispering forests.”¹ Yet the gesturing body is still present, in the muscular mass of the pieces and the whipping ribbons of clay that surmount them, like brushstrokes made dimensional.
Assembling California: Estero Trail in clay, underglaze, glaze, and paint. Designed and made by Ashwini Bhat, USA, 2019.
11” L x 15” W x 11” H
27.9cm L x 38.1cm W x 27.9cm H
SP1368