San Andreas Fault: A Collaboration

In January 2022, grieving the death of my mother, I began walking sections of the 800-mile San Andreas Fault. I was accompanied by my partner, the artist Ashwini Bhat. A recent immigrant to the USA, Bhat was thinking about what it might mean to belong to a place. For both of us, hiking along the fault served as a form of meditation—a kind of secular version of the stations of the cross—and, later, as form of intimate collaboration.

Eventually, the two of us found ourselves in the desolate town where I was born in the Mojave Desert. As my memories and the present mixed, as my tumultuous inner emotions and the landscape coalesced, I felt my sense of self become kaleidoscopic. History, a geologist knows, is never far below the surface. Along the desert’s and my own fault lines, I found myself crossing permeable dimensions of time and space, correlating my emotions and the stricken landscape with other schisms, the fractures and folds that underlie not only my country, but any self in its relationship with others.

In collaboration, a number of art works and poems emerged from these expeditions. In one of the installations, my poem appears as a kind of word-detritus strewn along the central rift of a fault zone created by Ashwini’s sculptural composition. The staggered left margins of the short poems enact slippages along a strike-slip fault. Several poems from this exploration appear in my recent book, Mojave Ghost: A Novel-Poem, while the sculptures were exhibited at Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles and at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

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*

Wind-tormented pines
comb evening             fog for moisture.

We come
                                 to the point under                 a clam-hunting moon.                           

Meadows of eel-grass
                         sashaying             in the estuary                             

So little
                             of importance                            has been left unsaid.                   



                                                  *

                        The Mojave, where whatever he is
                 debouches from its sluice. What
           is more sacred than the gratuitous

                        opulence of this emptiness?
                 She can see how she looks
           to him. In his face, can

                         see she is gorgeous. How
                 do I measure
           the inner experience of aging?

                         The and yet, the and still
                 of your affection.
           You disappear into my line of sight. 

                         As here takes its shape from you.

*


The oldest extant pigment of color, scraped
from rocks beneath the desert,          
is a flaming pink. Spring          

comes. It breaks into me. You                      
              break into me. While the past goes on lifting
out of itself like a wave.          

But you had the sense to linger by the shore
as I snorkeled out over the nebulous,
slo-mo, shark-eerie drop off    

of the shelf.                    

1. San Andreas Fault, Point Reyes (Assembling California)

Approximately 14 feet high and 18 feet wide. 22 Glazed ceramic segments as a single wall installation with poetry text.

2. Rift Zone (Assembling California)

52-inch diameter. Glazed ceramic wall sculpture on a wooden frame with text

3. Lovers on the Earthquake Trail (Assembling California)

52 / 24 / 24 inches. Glazed ceramic sculpture on a wooden base.

All images courtesy of Ashwini Bhat and Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Photos by John Janca

After thirty-five years in Southern India, transdisciplinary artist Ashwini Bhat now lives and works in the foothills of Sonoma Mountain, California. Coming from a background in literature and classical Indian dance, Bhat works in sculpture, ceramics, installation, and video, developing a unique visual language exploring the intersections between body and nature, self and other. Bhat is a 2023 United States Artists fellow. She is represented by Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles, USA, and Project 88, Mumbai, India.

Forrest Gander
, born in the Mojave Desert, lives in California. A translator/writer with degrees in geology and literature, he’s received the Pulitzer Prize and Best Translated Book Award. His book Twice Alive focuses on human and ecological intimacies. In October 2024, New Directions will bring out his long poem on the desert, Mojave Ghost: a Novel-Poem.

Photo by Dan Fontanelli

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