COMPASS ROSE

Compass Rose began as Ashwini Bhat’s engagement with Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, a book in which the protagonist, Marco Polo, describes in short lyrical paragraphs a string of cities, some real, some mythical. With support from a Howard Foundation Fellowship (for Sculpture), Compass Rose expanded into a multi-year collaboration with the American writer and translator, Forrest Gander. Sharing emphatically global perspectives and the determination that Western and so-called Third World artists must be seen on equal footing, the collaborators drew inspiration from Shang Dynasty oracle bone script, Germanic runes, Dongba pictographic glyphs, early Indian alphabets (with Aramaic sources), and proto-Phoenician alphabets (still visible in English writing). The clustered patterns of ceramic forms and words spark connections between topographical mapping and divination, burial sites and threnody, archeological excavations and passionate notes. Openness and connectivity are the salient themes. The installation provokes simultaneous expressions of shifting, interrelated human cultures. The longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates reference not only places where the artists worked together, but anyone’s palimpsest of memories of localities lived in or left behind. Perhaps more than anything, the collaboration invites an exploration of body and world, language and structure, human contacts that have taken place or are yet to come.

ASHWINI BHAT studied ceramics with Ray Meeker at Golden Bridge Pottery, Puducherry. She has a background in literature and dance. Her work has been featured in many galleries and publications in the US, India, Australia, Denmark, Ireland, China and Japan. In 2017, Ashwini was a guest artist at The Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park in Shiga, Japan. She lives in Petaluma, California.

FORREST GANDER is a writer and translator with degrees in geology and literature, was born in the Mojave Desert and lives in Petaluma, California. Gander’s book, Core Samples from the World, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is the recipient of grants from the Library of Congress, the Guggenheim, Howard, Whiting and United States Artists Foundations. Forrest was the Briggs-Copeland Poet at Harvard University and later the AK Seaver Professor of Literary Arts & Comparative Literature at Brown University.

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