Composition for Personal Place
with Ashwini Bhat / August 2021
About the Studio Session
How does our relationship with our surroundings influence what we make as artists? Inanimate objects can evoke sentiment and emotion, which can in turn become the underpinning and abstract narrative for the objects we create. In this Studio Session, participants will focus upon a particular place—be it in the form of memories, text, images, actual objects, or perhaps that physical space itself—as source material for making intimately scaled clay objects. We will use notions of structure, boundarylessness, spontaneity and choreography to consider the composition or assemblage of those objects.
About the Lead Artist
Ashwini Bhat is an artist born in southern India, who currently lives and works in the Bay Area, California. She holds an M.A degree in literature and had an earlier career in classical Indian dance. She often introduces radical but somehow familiar forms to suggest complex interplay between the landscape, the human, and the non-human.
Bhat was awarded a McKnight Foundation Residency Fellowship for 2021 and was a recipient of Howard Foundation Award in 2014. Her work has been exhibited nationally & internationally and can be seen in collections at the Newport Art Museum, USA; Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, Japan; FuLe International Ceramic Art Museum, China; the Watson Institute at Brown University, USA; New Bedford Historical Society, USA; Daugavpils Mark Rothko Centre, Latvia, and in many private collections. Her sculpture also has been widely reviewed and featured in Brooklyn Rail (USA), Lana Turner: a Journal of Poetry and Opinion (USA), Riot Material (USA), Ceramic Art and Perception (USA/Australia),, Ceramics Ireland (Ireland), New Ceramics (Germany), Caliban (USA), Crafts Arts International (Australia), The Studio Potter (USA), Logbook (Ireland), and Ceramics Monthly (USA).
Bhat is the guest curator for the 77th Scripps Annual, Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, Claremont, CA, 2022. Her work will be shown in Objects USA 2020, NY and at American Museum of Ceramic Art, CA in 2022.