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.

Explore

*

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