As someone involved in art, science and nature, I particularly enjoyed the current show at Lucy Lacoste Gallery, in Concord, Mass. It features the ceramic sculptures of Ashwini Bhat, whose work embodies her experiences as a classical Indian dancer, a painter, a writer, and a gardener. The show, “”What I Touch Touches Me,” is a visual and tactile representation of her California garden as she–and the garden–progressed through the pandemic. The result is a beautiful harvest of earthly and spiritual objects and ideas.
As Bhat explains: The structure of my new body of work is derived from my immersion in my surroundings in a dramatic, highly various, and fragile Northern California landscape. The sculptures are assembled in four segments: Comfort Objects, Animated Objects, Intimate Earth Objects, and Assemblage Objects.
Animated Object #4, below, brings to mind (for me) a leaf in the wind, a deeply colored Indian veil or scarf, and the graceful hand of dancer. ,
Comfort Objects evolved— during a pandemic in which touch has become unsafe— from Bhat’s examination of the shapes and forms of seed-pods “as symbols of mysterious, life-birthing potentialities.”
“Animated Objects are studies in gesture, movement, and the feelings evoked by[her} memories of objects that have deep personal associations for her.”
“Intimate Earth Objects” reference elements of earth and body. T” hese biomorphic forms enact the co-existence and mutuality of the human and non-human. And they also focus on the sorts of objects that are historically or culturally associated with rituals and sacrality. “
“Assemblage Objects juxtapose colors and consortiums of form that reference particular landscapes in which Bhat has spent time, she writes.
“All four segments are linked by allusions to primordial symbols or patterns such as the Mandala, Spiral, Serpent, the Ouroboros, and the Fibonacci sequence.
“But the meanings of these sculptures are fluid, not rigid,” Bhat explains. The objects might easily cross over and fit into other groupings. And this boundary-less-ness allows them to acquire multiple connotations. There is an open interplay of elements and a possibility of infinitely reassembling alliances. ” Bhat’s aim is”to suggest ways of looking that promote raveled and linked engagements that define the relation between all animate and inanimate matter.”
Also included in the show are several of Bhat’s watercolors….
and a piece from a previous exhibit, “Empowering Voices.”
–Anita M. Harris
Lucy Lacoste Gallery, is located 25 Main Street, Concord, MA The show will be up until June 5.
Anita Harris is a writer, photographer and communications consultant based in Cambridge, MA.
New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, also in Cambridge.
