Ashwini Bhat studied ceramics with Ray Meeker at Golden Bridge Pottery, Pondicherry. She has a M.A degree in literature and studied classical dance for nearly ten years before working as a professional dancer in the Padmini Chettur Dance Company for four years. Her work has been featured internationally in many galleries and exhibitions including, most recently, in NCECA (Providence, RI, 2015 and Houston, USA, 2013); Crimson Laurel Gallery (Bakersville, NC, USA, 2013/ 2012); Indian Museum at FLICAM (Fuping, China 2013); Clayspace Gallery (Asheville, NC, USA, 2012); the Sculpture Garden at Grand Hyatt (Chennai, India, 2011); India Art Summit (New Delhi, India, 2011); and Woodfire Tasmania (Australia, 2011). In 2012 Bhat built her studio and woodfiring kiln near Auroville, Pondicherry, India and continues to make sculptural ceramic works there and abroad. In 2014, she was a visiting artist at Gustin Ceramics, South Dartmouth, MA. She won the Howard Foundation Fellowship for Sculpture (2013-14). Currently her solo show, Earth Took of Earth, is in view at the Newport Art Museum, RI, USA.
The fluidity and figurative resonance of Bhat’s ceramic sculpture might result from the artist’s original background in Indian classical dance — the negotiation of space as ancillary to an overall positive form, and performative act of creation appealing to Bhat. “The Realm of the Hungry Ghosts” suggests an elemental fusion of subject and object, landscape and figure sliding together to become single, more definitively abstract entities — the geological curvatures embedded in the vessels feeling clearly resolved from the material nature of the clay, but conscious tooof a human presence upon its overall resolution.
