Ashwini Bhat


Ashwini Bhat is an artist, based in Petaluma, California. She is known for her sculptures.

Biography and work

Born in Puttur, Karnataka, India Ashwini Bhat earned a master's degree in literature from Bangalore University. She studied classical dance for thirteen years and traveled internationally as a professional dancer in the Padmini Chettur Dance Company before beginning a career as a visual artist.
Bhat studied ceramics with Ray Meeker at Golden Bridge PotteryPondicherry where she later worked as an artist-in-residence before building her studio and woodfiring kiln near Auroville, Pondicherry, India.
Since 2015, she has lived in the USA.
Bhat lives in Petaluma with poet, writer Forrest Gander.

Style and critical responses

Ashwini Bhat makes sculptural forms, some intimate scale and some larger than human scale.
She has collaborated with other artists and writers, including Sharbani Das Gupta, Debra Smith, and Forrest Gander. In addition to gallery shows in India, her work has been exhibited in the USA, in Australia and in China and featured in major art publications such as Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry & Opinion, New Ceramics, Ceramic Art and Perception, Marg Publications, Ceramics Ireland, Ceramics Monthly, Crafts Arts International, Info Ceramica, Art India, and Art New England
Stephen S. Bush, professor of religious studies and philosophy at Brown University, writes in his essay ‘Philosophical Perspectives on Emerson and Ashwini Bhat’
, “The terrestrial themes of her sculptures, in combination with their humanistic sensibility, emphasize the fundamental embeddedness of humans in their geologic environs and the continuities between humanity and nature. By grounding human concerns so thoroughly in the dirt—used here as a term of approbation—Bhat’s sculptures speak of thoroughly immanent value.”

Awards